Alan Boyle has a long review of the movie Expelled. While I largely agree with it (and it has reduced my estimation of Ben Stein, who seems to have gone completely off the deep end, tremendously), it is marred, severely in my opinion, by the use of the politically loaded word, "swiftboating," not just in the text, but in the title itself.
He seems, from context, to be using the word in its popular, but grossly mistaken and (Democrat) partisan sense, as in "spreading malicious lies about something or someone." But for those of us actually paying attention at the time, and using more enlightened sources than Lawrence O'Donnell screaming "Liar! Liar! Liar!" at John O'Neill, the word means "revealing inconvenient truths about a political candidate who is a Democrat." Most of the charges of the Swift Boaters were in fact validated--on the subject of Christmas in Cambodia, despite it being "seared, seared into his memory," John Kerry was either lying or fantasizing, and his campaign essentially was forced to admit that. And the video of his Senate testimony in which he slandered his fellow sailors, airmen, marines and soldiers, calling them war criminals, was indisputable.
So it would be far better to simply avoid the word, given the fact that it has almost exactly the opposite meaning to two different sets of readerships, and is bound to raise hackles, regardless of the context. I expect it from political polemicists, but I expect (and almost always get) much better from Alan.
I'll have more thoughts on the movie itself (which I haven't seen, and have no plans to), but will save them for another post.
[Thursday morning update]
Alan responds, but seems to miss the point that I was making. Apparently, to him, the term "swiftboat" as a verb simply means "negative campaigning," something that he doesn't like. But I don't think that's what it means to most people, on either side of the partisan divide. As I describe above, Democrat partisans have come to use it to mean not just negative campaigning, but lying about their candidate, whereas those of us who were opposed to John Kerry (for reasons that the Swift Boat Vets stated, and many others) view it as telling inconvenient truths that didn't reflect well on him. Both of those fall under the rubric of "negative campaigning," if by that one means saying things about a candidate (or a concept) with the intent of making people think less of them.
Now, in light of what I think is my understanding of Alan's point, I disagree. I actually have no problem at all with negative campaigning per se, if the campaign is truthful. I think that in order to make a judgment about a candidate or an issue, the more information the better, both pro and con. If a candidate happens to be an ax murderer, would there be something reprehensible about pointing this out? I think that it would be information that the voting public would have a right to know, despite the fact that it's (sigh) "negative."
Likewise, I have no problem with movies that oppose evolution, per se, as long as they're honest, and I would not characterize such movies as "Swift Boating" (particularly since I think that the Swift Boat Vets, in pointing out facts about John Kerry of which the voting public was largely unaware, performed a public service). From what I've heard about Expelled, however, it's scurrilous, and to associate the tactics used there with John O'Neill and his cohorts is slanderous, if not libelous, to them. There's been a lot of discussion about the movie in the last couple days, and the war on science in general (a war that, by the way, contra Chris Mooney's flawed, or at least limited, thesis, is thoroughly bi-partisan). I hope to provide a link roundup and some thoughts of my own shortly, if I can find the time.
In any event, I continue to find Alan's usage of the new (and ambiguous) verb "swiftboating" problematic, for reasons stated above. As I already noted, I expect to hear that word from "political consultants" on partisan talkfests on the cable news channels, but not in a reasoned discussion about science and society.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:18 PMSomething tells me that we haven't seen or heard the last of Reverend Wright:
"After 20 years of loving Barack like he was a member of his own family, for Jeremiah to see Barack saying over and over that he didn't know about Jeremiah's views during those years, that he wasn't familiar with what Jeremiah had said, that he may have missed church on this day or that and didn't hear what Jeremiah said, this is seen by Jeremiah as nonsense and betrayal," said the source, who has deep roots in Wright's Chicago community and is familiar with his thinking on the matter.
Up until now, the defense has been that these remarks of Wrights were atypical and taken out of context, and sufficiently rare that Obama never happened to have heard them, despite having been a church member for two decades and sitting regularly in the pews. Not that I've ever bought it, but that was the story.
Now Wright himself is saying (and made pretty clear on Monday) that these are not just sporadic and infrequent flights of fancy, but things that he fervently believes and is happy to tell anyone on any occasion, including Sunday sermons. And furthermore, he knows that his protege was well aware of his views (and may even have thought that he agreed with them, though that's less clear).
I have a pretty low opinion of the pastor, for a lot of reasons, but I haven't yet seen any evidence that he's a liar. But either he is prevaricating, or Obama is. I know where I'd put my money at this point. This will be a ticking time bomb going into the fall. I hope that the Democrats continue to let it tick.
[Update at 2:45 PM EDT]
Ramesh Ponnuru defends Wright (err...sort of):
One theme I've seen in the commentary about Wright, especially the liberal commentary, is how terrible it is, how selfish, for Wright to get in the way of Obama's presidential campaign. There are a lot of grounds for criticizing Wright--that he is an anti-American and racist buffoon, example--but I don't see why he should keep quiet just to keep from inconveniencing a political candidate. He takes these. . . ideas of his very seriously, and he has the opportunity of a lifetime to disseminate them. Why wouldn't he take it?
Beyond that, there seems to be this implicit assumption among the liberal media and Obama supporters (but I repeat myself) that Wright does (and should) want to see his congregant become president. Hence the anguished cries of "betrayal!, and "selfishness!"
But if Obama is elected president, doesn't that knock the legs out from under his race- and class-war theories? Doesn't it show that perhaps AmeKKKa isn't the racist monster of his sermons?
On the other hand, if Obama loses, doesn't it validate his (and Michelle's) hatred of this racist country, as bad as (or worse than!) Al Qaeda? And then doesn't he get to continue hawking his paranoia and lunacy to the chumps, and continue to get their adulation? And moolah from the DVD sales? Gotta keep up the payments on the mansion, you know.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:04 AMAn interesting comment from someone who claims to work on the program, over at Space Politics (it's the sixteenth one), in response to the usual idiocy that everything is fine with ESAS, and that we all have to get behind it, and there are no other choices:
Your interpretation of published Ares I status is overly optimistic to an extreme. For instance, the J-2X ignition tests to which you refer has been done at the igniter level, a far cry from an actual engine test. The J-2X exists only on paper, and still very much at the powerpoint level.
The Ares I-X is also merely a stunt and represents no true progress to an actual flight configuration. It's what we in the business refer to as an "Admiral's Test," looks impressive to the uninformed, but adds no value to the final product.You'll find that many of us Ares I naysayers actually work on or have involvement with the project. Ask the troops at MSFC and you'll get a completely different story than what you're getting through the NASA propaganda machine.
A lot of us are concerned with what kind of reputation we'll be left with when Griffin leaves and this whole Ares I/ESAS debacle is exposed.
That certainly rings true to me, based on other emails I get from program insiders.
Meanwhile, over at NASA Space Flight, there's a description of proposed solutions to the Ares vibration issue. The first one is the most interesting kludgesolution:
The anti-Thrust Oscillation RCS would be a totally new system, located on the aft skirt of the Ares I booster. Known as Active Pulse Thrusters (APT), documentation shows this system to hold the potential of reducing Thrust Oscillation by around 10 times that which is currently expected.
'Active Pulse Thrusters (RCS TO Damper): First Stage carries most of the design changes (Orion Service Module tanks change required),' noted associated documentation on this concept. 'Could provide 10X reduction in TO. Relatively mature thruster design. Self contained. Relatively mature control system.'However, it would - as with most of the mitigation options - hold a mass impact on the vehicle, something Ares I has been struggling with since its early design cycles.
'Performance and aft skirt design challenge: (around) 500 lbm (pounds mass) payload impact. Trade required for separation and booster deceleration. Add failure modes. Must survive aft skirt environments.'
The system consists of four pods, located around the aft skirt on the Ares I First Stage. Early graphics of a system - that are bound to mature if accepted as the way forward - show each pod will have a fuel tank, an oxidizer tank, a pressurant tank, and seven thrusters.
The downside of this concept - which is a completely separate system than the roll control system on the interstage - is the addition of failure modes, which would hit Ares I's LOC/M (Loss of Crew/Mission) numbers.
Also on the downside, the concept is a retro thrusting system (negative thrusting) - which would impact on Ares I's performance figures.
OK, if I understand this correctly, this is what I would call the "Bose headphone" approach. Apparently, the plan is to actually fire thrusters in a direction opposite to the main thrust, at a frequency and phase to actually cancel out the vibration of the SRM. The description of the downside of this solution is a little dry, to me. They are introducing a new, complicated, expensive-to-develop-and-test system into the vehicle, which will add weight and (probably weird) potential failure modes, and reduce the net thrust of the vehicle, thus reducing its payload performance, which already has essentially no margin.
Great.
Next? Isolation mounts:
'May reduce payload by 1000 lbm. Reduces lateral stiffness unless mitigated in the design. Adds failure modes. Changes system modes for loads and control.'
"...unless mitigated in the design." There is an implicit assumption in that statement that such a mitigation is possible, but it may not be. I suspect that it doesn't just reduce lateral stiffness, but may also reduce stiffness in bending, which means more potential problems as the upper stage wiggles back and forth on top of the SRB, adding to the joy of the ride for the crew, and further complicating the control system's job, in all three axes.
They're right--this one is unlikely to survive the trade study.
Even the third, favored option is a kludge, which "consists of rails and springs under the top plate of the parachute platform on the First Stage. The active system would require a control system and associated battery power supply - all located under the aeroshell that houses the drogue parachute."
"The passive system has a rail attachment on the forward skirt extension of the First Stage providing lateral support. Damping would be provided by springs attached through the ancillary ring."
Rube Goldberg, call your office.
I've probably used this Einstein quote already recently, but it continues to apply: a clever man solves a problem--a wise man avoids it. This is all the result of the strange decision to use a Shuttle SRB as a first stage. That was not a necessary choice, and a good trade study (as opposed to the sixty-day exercise) would have identified these problems up front, and considered them in the trade. Anyone want to bet that it did?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:03 AMThere were some shots fired at Florida Atlantic University (two or three miles from my house) at a party last night. In what's obviously a ridiculous and gross overreaction to the Virginia Tech massacre, classes have been cancelled, the entire campus has been locked down, and twenty-five hundred students are now essentially prisoners in their dorms.
How long will this go on? Who knows? It could be days before they find the perp (no one was killed, and one person was wounded, and it's not even clear that the wound was from the gun), and they may never do so.
Florida is a shall-issue state, but I suspect that the school (like most) foolishly bans guns on campus (which obviously worked so well last night). Unfortunately, despite the fact that all the students are adults, and there's no reason to think that the shooter has any intention to shoot people on campus, they are being treated like children, deprived of the means to defend themselves, and locked away in their rooms. It's a continuation of the infantilization of society, and the growth of the nanny state. Obviously, the authorities are worried about being accused of not being sufficiently solicitous of the safety of the students, but apparently they don't believe that their liberty has any value. They need to understand that they have to have some balance. If I were one of those students, I'd bring suit for false imprisonment.
[Update an hour or so later]
I just heard that the police are "searching Boca Raton" for the gunman. So they're not restricting their search to campus? I'm only three miles or so from campus. Why haven't they come down my street and locked us in our houses? He could be anywhere. Why restrict it to campus?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:43 AMRob Bailey has an interview with Peter Thiel. I agree with him that "transhumanist" is a misleading word, and it's not useful to use it until there's agreement on what is human. Unlike people like Asimov (and Kass) I don't believe that we lose our humanity when we live indefinitely long.
I would have been interested to hear his thoughts on space.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AMAdvice for the lovelorn, from Senator Barack Obama. Well, who would know better than him?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:27 AMRush is considering shifting his support from Hillary! to him. I predicted this weeks ago, but it makes the point that, contrary to the speculation by some, "Operation Chaos" is not about making Hillary! the nominee per se--it's about keeping the fight going as long as possible, and weakening the ultimate Dem nominee as much as possible. The best historical analogy (for those historically ignorant morons who think that Saddam was our "ally" in the eighties) was the Iran/Iraq war, in which the goal was to help whichever side was perceived to be weaker, in hopes that they would both ultimately lose.
And with regard to the Democrats, that is an objective with which I heartily concur, as unenthusiastic as I am about the Republican nominee.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:16 PMAs I said previously, either he was aware of this kind of thing for the past two decades and had no real problem with it, or he was unaware of it, demonstrating an utter cluelessness. And I don't buy the latter. I don't believe that Wright suddenly changed, and I don't believe that Obama believes that he did. Somehow, I have a feeling that the only thing that really outrages and saddens Barack Obama is the fact that his former pastor has switched from being a political asset in Chicago to being a political liability nationally.
In any event, either way, he's not fit to to get my vote for president. I suspect that a lot (too many for him to win) of other people will have the same opinion.
As someone once said, sincerity is the key to success in life. If you can fake that, you have it made. I think that Obama's mask is starting to slip.
[Update a few minutes later]
I agree with Roger Simon that this is a tragedy for race relations in this country (and that Obama has been to them what Bill and Hillary were for gender feminism).
The situation is close to tragic and this election year shows a real chance of running off the rails in a way few of us would have predicted. It has a potential for pushing race relations seriously backwards in a society that was already relatively open handed. People do not like being accused of racism when it is not there. The original attraction of the Obama campaign is that it was post-racial and now it is anything but.
This is not the fault of America or of the American people. It has been caused by the race baiters and the spinelessness and opportunism of Barack Obama. He made his compact with the race-baiting devil twenty years ago and now, in the immortal words of Reverend Wright, "it has come home to roost."
Obama still has a chance to salvage his "post-racial candidacy," if not his campaign, which (I suspect) is now a completely lost cause. What we need from him is a real speech on race in America, where he calls out the true haters and bigots, and poverty pimps and shakedown artists in his own party--the Jesse Jacksons and Al Sharptons who keep their own people on the "liberal" plantation. That would be a service to the nation, and a speech worth praising. But I don't think he has either the political acumen or courage to do that. Not to mention that it would estrange his own wife. I guess that, with this implosion of his candidacy, Michelle (whose pastor Wright no doubt really was) won't have any more reason to be proud of America.
[Another update]
Obama has been telling us that his lack of experience doesn't matter, because what is important is not experience, but "judgment." But just what does this episode say about his vaunted judgment?
Back on March 18, Obama declared that we were being unfair in concluding Jeremiah Wright was "a crank or a demagogue" because we didn't know him the way Obama did. We were reaching that conclusion based on "snippets" and "soundbites," whereas he could take the full assessment based on a close relationship of 20 years or so.
He was, he assured us, in a better position to make a better judgment.Today, Obama tells us, he doesn't really know Jeremiah Wright at all.
And now, it seems, we're in better position to make a judgment about Barack Obama.
UPDATE: Paraphrasing a reader's suggestion, foreseeing an Oval Office address near the end of Obama's first term: "The Prime Minister Ahmadinejad who ordered the nuclear strike on Tel Aviv yesterday... is not the same man I met in Tehran at our summit back in 2009."
Heh.
Of course, this argument would carry a little more weight if George Bush hadn't declared that he could see Putin's soul in his eyes. On the other hand, as much as he'd no doubt like to be, Obama isn't running against George Bush.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:32 PMA month ago, at the XCOR press conference, Mike Kelly told me about this possibility, but asked me to keep it confidential. But now Charles Lurio says that it's official. Mike is taking the position of Chief Engineer for FAA-AST, reporting directly to George Nield. I can't think of a better man for the spot, given his long history as chairman of the COMSTAC RLV working group, and long-standing support of reusable vehicles.
Congratulations. It's good news for Mike, and good news for the space industry. And since it's not (at least that I'm aware of) a political position, there's a good chance that he would survive a change of administration, even if George doesn't.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:20 PMThe New York Times maintains its perfect record.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:49 AMAlan Boyle has a roundup of links on the latest Soyuz entry mishap. I think that this is going to have an effect on policy, but it's unclear what it will be, so far.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:16 AMA couple years ago, I speculated on whether or not Bill Clinton could have been elected if there had been a blogosphere in 1992. I called him an MSM president.
Now Chuck Todd says that he has been done in by new media (specifically, Youtube):
Although Clinton caught a glimpse of the digital future when he was president and a little-known Internet gadfly named Matt Drudge broke the Monica Lewinsky story, he was never subjected to the kind of unblinking scrutiny of today's media environment.
When Clinton was running for president, Todd said, he and his fellow candidates could misspeak -- and even willfully obfuscate -- with relative impunity."It was like a Jedi mind trick with him," he added. "It would take a few days for the media to catch up [and] by then he had moved on."
Well, it was a Jedi mind trick that never worked with me. Or in fact, not even a majority, since he could never win a majority. But he always had the press on his side, at least until their new love from Chicago came along.
[Via Virginia Postrel, who is, happily, currently cancer free]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:49 AM[Note: I've bumped this post from yesterday to the top, because it has some new content today, and is getting a lot of commentary]
Could Obama do for race relations? It is a situation, with a history, steeped in irony.
Younger people might not be aware, but there was a time, back in the early nineties, when feminist principles like opposition to sexual harassment in the workplace (including consensual sexual relations between people of widely disparate power relations) were viewed with widespread societal approval, and even made subject to civil law suits. It was considered intolerable by many to have any physical contact in the work place whatsoever. Beyond that, women who accused men of sexual impropriety were to be protected and provided with credibility, not derided and slandered in an attempt to reduce their credibility. Whether one agrees with it or not, this was the cultural norm, and became established law.
Then came Bill and Hillary Clinton, ostensible supporters of all of this. Until...until...it became inconvenient for them. Oh, they continue to pay it lip service, but when Gennifer Flowers accused Bill of having a twelve-year affair with him, and had audio tape to prove it, she was attacked as a liar and a slut, by the Clintons' henchmen (and henchwomen), masterminded by Hillary. When Paula Jones, a lowly state employee, came forth with a story of being escorted by a state policeman to Governor Clinton's hotel suite, whereupon he demanded that she fellate him, she was called "trailer trash," and her lawsuit (perfectly legitimate) was fought on the basis that she had no right to bring a kingpresident to trial. When Kathleen Willey complained that she had been groped in the Oval Office when she came to ask the president for a job after her husband had committed suicide, she was essentially called a liar by the president's lawyer. Her tires were slashed, her children were threatened, and her family cat was found dead. When Monica Lewinski's activities were exposed, there was a back-channel whispering campaign by people like Sid Blumenthal that she was a "stalker," and mentally unstable, and not to be believed. This campaign would no doubt have continued ad infinitum had she not taken Linda Tripp's sage advice and hung on to the blue-stained dress, which ultimately revealed who was really the liar in the affair.
In each and every case, in order to quell (in the campaign and White House's own words) a "bimbo eruption," the "bimbos" were considered fair game.
This is hypocritical and appalling enough in its own right, but what is much worse, at least for the people who originally developed and defended those feminist ideals that were trampled by the Clintons, was the degree to which, like Hillary, they were cynically willing to completely abandon them in order to defend not only the first "black president," but the first "feminist" one. Gloria Steinem, yes the Gloria Steinem, wrote a famous piece in the New York Times in which she in essence said that the president was entitled to one free grope. Because it was the Clintons, the "sluts and nuts" defense became acceptable to the formerly easily oh-so-outraged gender warriors.
This sordid tale of hypocrisy, and destruction of feminist idealism by this cynical devotion to the Clintons was described extensively by libertarian feminist Cathy Young almost ten years ago.
Well, the Clintons have aged, and grown tiresome, and the media and the movement have "moved on" (so to speak), tossed the Clintons out like yesterday's news, and found a new paramour--a young, fresh face, in the form of an attractive (to many) articulate person of color, even if the hue is less than full due to the taint of his white ancestry. They don't need a faux black president, as Bill was--they can get a real one this time. Almost, anyway.
The parallels with the Clintons are in fact quite striking, in terms of the media love affair, the willingness to run interference for potential scandals, and now, in their willingness to toss overboard more supposed "liberal" shibboleths, in the interest of keeping his candidacy alive, just as they were willing to destroy feminism in order to save it, to keep a pro-abortion president in office (even though he would have been replaced with another pro-abortion president in the person of Al Gore had he been removed).
This time, it's race, as Victor Davis Hanson explains:
...Wright's speech on black-right brainers, white-left brainers -- replete with bogus stereotypes and crude voice imitations -- was about as racist as they come and at one time antithetical to what the NAACP was once all about. Again, the Obama campaign and its appendages have set back racial relations a generation. Just ten years ago, any candidate, black or white, would have rejected Wright making a speech about genetic differences in respective black and white brains. Now it's given to civil rights organizations by the possible next President's pastor and spiritual advisor -- and done to wild applause for an organization founded on the idea that we are innately the same, while being gushed over by ignorant "commentators."
As I said before, between Wright's racism and hatred, and Obama's contextualization of what he has said, we have so lowered the bar that the next racist (and he won't necessarily be black) who evokes hatred of other races and then offers a mish-mash pop theory of genetic differences will have plenty of "context" to ward off public fury.
And the amazing thing (or it would be if it hadn't become so depressingly familiar) is that the press doesn't merely acquiesce to such destruction of heretofore liberal ideals--it actively cheers it, through empty-headed mouthpieces like Soledad O'Brien. Because their hero, Barack Obama, will not separate himself from his former pastor, they choose not the solution of abandoning their hero. No, instead, they are compelled to make a new hero of, and treat like a rock star, a bigoted, paranoid scientific ignoramus. And in so doing, to turn their backs on, and leave in shreds, what they once thought were racially enlightened ideals.
But I would reassure Professor Hanson on one point. If the next ignoramus to come down the chute turns out to be a white man, opposing racism will become fashionable once again, with all the continuing attendant hypocrisy.
[Update in the evening]
In response to some questions in comments, here's an interesting quote from Reverend Wright, sure to put some soothing salve on the wounds of the nation's racial divide:
"Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion. He was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter's being vilified for and Bishop Tutu's being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I'm anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago. He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century; that's what I think about him. . . . Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains, he did not put me in slavery, and he didn't make me this color."
Let's leave aside for the moment the ludicrous hyperbole that Reverend Wright was ever put in chains, and ever put in slavery. Of course, no one living today put Reverend Wright, or any member of his flock, in chains or slavery. The closest slave to Reverend Wright would probably be his grandfather, if not his great-grandfather. And that person was at least two generations, and probably more, from being put into chains and being sold into that state.
But here's the most ironic part. Louis is a Muslim, or so he claims. Anyone familiar with the history of the slave trade knows the religion of the people who sold blacks into slavery to be sent to the New World. Hint: it was not Christian. For the most part, the slaves were sold in Africa to the British slavers by (Islamic) Arabs, who remain one of the most racist peoples on earth to this day.
Yet Reverend Wright defends the hateful (and racist--and he did call Judaism a "gutter religion," regardless of false denials that it was "only" about "Zionism") Farrakhan by attacking white people living today, who have put no one in chains, and sold no one into slavery. I wonder what he has to say about the real slavery, that continues today, in Sudan and other places (predominantly Islamic and Arabic)?
Be sure to read the Wright/Obama-defending insanity in the comments at Milbanks' post as well.
[Tuesday morning update]
Joe Katzman, on the mendacity and fascist nature of the Obama campaign and cult.
Errrr...but Joe? Just for the record, "belief" actually is a noun, not a verb.
One other thought. If Jeremiah Wright really does represent "the black church" and his beliefs mirror those of the black community, America is in trouble, and black America is in very deep trouble.
Fortunately, I think (and certainly fervently hope) that there are many black Americans who are as repulsed by Wright's racist beliefs and words as the rest of us are, and recognize what a disaster they have been for their community. But we (and even more, they) need a lot more Bill Cosbys, and many fewer Reverend Wrights.
[Update a couple minutes later]
From a comment at Joe's post, a good point. Obama has a much bigger problem than his pastor. He could have the mother of all Sister Souljah moments with Jeremiah Wright, and perhaps turn this around. But he can't disown his wife.
[8:30 AM update]
I didn't listen to Wright's whole speech, but Lileks did, so we don't have to:
Turns out that was just the warm-up act. I heard the entire Rev. Wright speech today, so I'm not talking anything out of context - unless there was some peculiar non-verbal aspect, like an aura or a thick cloud overhead that formed instructive and helpful shapes, the endorsement of Farrakhan, the attacks on "Zionism" in the context of UN resolutions, and the explanations of the effect on racially-distinctive brain structure on marching-band styles was pretty hard to misconstrue.
The most amusing response, aside from the sort of obdurate denial you might find in someone who just created a fantastic beach sculpture and sees a tsunami on the horizon, is the Conspiracy Theory. Who? Jews! Of course! On the radio today I heard someone who managed to combine the far trailing tips of leftist and right-wing nuttery, and tie them into a neat bow. The JEWS were doing this to shake Obama loose from Rev. Wright; the JEWS were the ones who had devised this non-issue and pushed it to the front through their tentacular media control. Apparently a team of crack Jewish Ninja Hypnotists got Rev. Wright to make these recent appearances, too.
Sorry, but there is no "context" that can change my opinion of the nuttiness, paranoia, and mindless anger of the excerpts that I've read and heard. I'm long on record of thinking that Obama can't win in November, and this only reinforces that view. Even if he Sister Souljahed Wright now, it's too late. It raises too many questions. How could he have associated with this man for twenty years, knowing what he believes, and preaches? Alternately, how could he have done so, and not known? He is either sympathetic to these views, or he's clueless. Either way, he'll be too thoroughly unacceptable to too many Americans at this point to be in any way electable.
I just hope that the Dems don't figure it out. Fortunately, based on a lot of the commentary from Obama defenders, both here and other places, they may remain in denial, right up until the convention and beyond. And if they do figure it out, they'll lose the black and youth vote. They are royally screwed, and it couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of identity-politics mongers.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:23 AMBetter (and longer) living through molecular assembly:
"I think the most profound - I use this word repeatedly - transformative potential that this technology has is to basically democratize modern medicine."In other words, nanotech has the potential to instantly diagnose and treat disease.
As Chris Peterson says, "bring it on."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:36 PMAs Oscar Wilde once said of the death of Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone to read this and not laugh out loud:
Convening its national convention in Kansas City today, the Constitution Party picked radio talk-show host Chuck Baldwin over former Ambassador Alan Keyes as its 2008 presidential candidate.
Maybe Dr. Keyes can start working the late-night circuit.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:09 PMWell, if not his oyster, at least his dippy dot:
"It seems the legends of 21st-century man's crude ice cream-eating habits are all true," Wolcott said. "I see the way you consume these dripping concoctions with protruding tongues, the way the dark cream dribbles down your chins, the way your workers must dig tirelessly with spherical metal 'scooping' devices to even obtain this product."
"Barbarians!" Wolcott added. "Dippin' Dots can be poured effortlessly into cups. They do not melt or make a mess, and plus they are very fun to eat."
Now, it would seem to me that this is a man after Leon Kass' heart. Not to mention, ironically, that it gives this enemy of longevity a reason to live, and see such a marvelous future, in which he will no longer have to suffer the indignity of seeing people licking cones in the street, like so many cats at bath.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:56 PMIt's been a year since Henry Cate kicked off the Carnival of Space. He's asking for entries for the anniversary edition:
Fraser Cain, the current organizer of the Carnival of Space, has graciously asked me to host the anniversary edition of the Carnival of Space.Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AMCould you:
1) Consider sending in an entry to the carnival? Send the link to a post about space to:
carnivalofspace@gmail.com. It is helpful if you include a brief summary of your post.2) Encourage your readers to also send in an entry?
You could direct them here.
Reihan Salam explains:
Not only did Obama not expand beyond his core constituencies--as always, he was crushed among Catholics, an atypically big slice of Pennsylvania's Democratic electorate, and white working-class voters--he lost ground with affluent professionals, the group that has powered his historic fundraising success, with weekly churchgoers, and with the moderates who have until recently seen him as one of their own. He lost Greater Pittsburgh and the Philadelphia suburbs by wide margins, and he also lost the northeastern part of the state by a whopping 66 to 34 percent. In a new Brookings study of Pennsylvania's political demographics, William Frey and Ruy Teixeira identify this region, centered on Allentown, as key to the state's political future. If Pennsylvania's Northeast keeps trending Democratic, the state will become solidly blue. But if a Republican candidate can hold the line or make some modest gains with the region's white working class voters, the picture looks very different. And as it turns out, the GOP may have a candidate who can do just that in John McCain. As Hillary Clinton's campaign slow-marches to its unhappy end, she is offering lessons not only for how McCain can defeat Obama--she is pointing towards a possible bright future for the Republican brand. She's probably not thrilled about that. But before we get ahead of ourselves, it's worth considering the scale of the obstacles Republicans face.
Note that Salam doesn't agree that McCain is by any means a lock, but I think that this paragraph explains Obama's big problem in winning in November. Hillary! has a different set.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:05 AMWe're Democrats.
[Update a few minutes later]
This seems related.
Not only can Democrats not handle the truth, but when truth is told about them, the truth tellers are called liars. Even by Saint Barack:
When called out on something -- say, misquoting McCain on the 100 years statement -- Obama's reflexive move is to insist the person doubting his credibility is lying. When Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopolous asked him tough questions, his followers screamed bloody murder.
The strategy is clear: when you say something negative about Obama, you will be accused of lying.
Well, at least they're not threatening to chop off our heads.
Yet.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:48 AMWhich is stranger, that the editor of the Boston Herald has a picture of Che in his office ("for inspiration") or that Howie Kurtz offers that fact without comment?
Is it because Kevin Convey considers the newspaper a "guerilla" operation against the Globe? Does he know who Che was, and what he did? What does he plan to do with his own vanquished enemies, assuming his success?
Since reading Jonah's book
Bruce Bawer, on the cultural surrender of the west, aided and abetted by our own media, and the multi-culturalists in both academia and government.
Not exactly a new theme, but it doesn't hurt to repeat or remind, for those who haven't seen things like this, or have gone back to sleep.
It's a long piece, but this is really the nut of it:
What has not been widely recognized is that the Ayatollah Khomeini's 1989 fatwa against Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie introduced a new kind of jihad. Instead of assaulting Western ships or buildings, KhoÂmeini took aim at a fundamental Western freedom: freedom of speech. In recent years, other Islamists have joined this crusade, seeking to undermine Western societies' basic liberties and extend sharia within those societies.
The cultural jihadists have enjoyed disturbing success.
Sadly, he makes a good case.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:39 AMPamela Bone, who broke with the Left over the common cause that so much of it found with radical Islam, has died of cancer.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 PMSince Saddam was removed from power, there's been a vacancy in George Bush's three-nation "axis of evil." It looks like Syria has decided to apply for the position (and did so long ago, and even at the time was no doubt an unindicted co-conspirator--one wonders why Bush didn't include it in the beginning). Now, Austin Bay discusses the disturbing relationship between the two dictatorships of Syria and North Korea, and their increasingly evident first-strike posture.
Given Nancy Pelosi's idiotic visit with Assad earlier, and the dictator-soothing noises coming from the Obama campaign, Israel has to be very nervous about the Democrats running both the executive and legislative branch. Don't be surprised to see more strikes on Syria, and on Iran itself, this fall, if it looks like Obama is going to win, or does win--they won't want to wait until it's too late, after he's taken office in January.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:46 AMOn the peacefulness of an armed society:
Brits arriving in New York, hoping to avoid being slaughtered on day one of their shopping mission to Manhattan are, by day two, beginning to wonder what all the fuss was about. By day three they have had had the scales lifted from their eyes.
I have met incredulous British tourists who have been shocked to the core by the peacefulness of the place, the lack of the violent undercurrent so ubiquitous in British cities, even British market towns."It seems so nice here," they quaver.
Well, it is!
How about that. This kind of ignorance is what happens when you rely on the BBC (in general) for your news about the colonies. Which makes it all the more surprising and out of character for it to print a piece like this.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:12 AM"If your mentor of 20 years has ever declared the United States to be 'the same as al-Qaeda, under a different color flag, calling on the name a different God to sanction and approve our murder and our mayhem!' you are ineligible for the Presidency."
More wit and wisdom from Jeremiah Wright, who doesn't seem to want his protege to be president.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:17 PMPeople have been speculating about this sort of thing for years, but one of the nice things about having a decent-sized orbital facility is that we can actually prototype them, and figure out if any are interesting enough to think about building inflatable stadia for them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:19 AM...I don't use Microsoft Server software.
Why would anyone use Microsoft on their server? I can understand the desktop, for naive users, who also use the crap at home, but on a server?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:47 PMI hope you're sitting down.
People are driving less because of higher gas prices.
Gee, somebody should write a book
...this will be the reason:
My support for McCain has been just as tentative as McCain's support for market liberty, the Constitution, limited government, low taxes and not buying in to the leftist takeover on climate change.
I've had it with him with this latest insult. I didn't like him showing up that Cincinnatti guy supporting him either. If he doesn't like their tone, tell them in private. I want an apology to the North Carolina GOP or no more money.Treat other Republicans with respect, period.
This anti-Republican schtick endears him with the press, but he can't count on enough independents to win, if the base stays home.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:17 AMDavid Freddoso is still angry about our insane and, in my opinion, criminal ethanol and sugar policies:
The problem is that our sugar industry has even better lobbyists than big ethanol. They enjoy price supports, which we pay for both through the Treasury and in the supermarket. The price of our sugar is usually twice that of the world market. The sugar growers love it -- even if they cannot sell all of their sugar, they have a guaranteed government buyer at an inflated price. The corn growers love it too, because high U.S. sugar prices push our food industries to use high-fructose corn syrup (ever seen that on a product label?) as an alternative sweetener -- yet another artificial support for the world price of corn.
Not to mention wreaking havoc on the Everglades. Price-supported sugar cane is using up a lot of the water that both south Floridian humans and animals need, and they do this with the same political clout that they use to get the subsidies and tariffs, for an industry that is not all that big in terms of the economy.
Even if we want ethanol, we can't solve the problem by importing sugar, because there are tariffs in place. We can't import the ethanol itself because there's a high tariff against that, too. Wherever you turn, there's no way out -- Americans don't enjoy economic freedom, we live in a managed economy.
It makes me especially proud of my country when I see Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) call foreign delegates' concerns over a potential doubling of world hunger "a joke..."
Let's call these people out for what they are--Republicans and Democrats alike--fascists. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
[Update a few minutes later]
[Update early evening]
Oh, wonderful:
Key House and Senate farm bill negotiators reached agreement today on the main elements of the farm bill...[T]he five-year bill would raise the target prices and loan rates for northern crops beginning in 2010, raise the sugar loan rate three-quarters of a cent and include a sugar-to-ethanol program.
Oh, that's just great. We have a program that makes us overpay for sugar, and now we're going to start a new program to subsidize the ethanol we create from it -- because without the subsidy, the inflated sugar price we've created will make the ethanol unprofitable.
Just when you think it can't get any worse, they always find a way.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:19 AMAre we at war with Jihadism?
Of course it is true that Islamic reformers are trying to redefine the very troubling concept of jihad as a positive: viz., an internal struggle for personal betterment. Much as I'd love them to succeed, it is a well-intentioned folly -- largely because of modern culture, which puts such a premium on authenticity. If you want to encourage the reformers, then encourage them to drop the concept of jihad altogether. As a matter of history, jihad is a military obligation. As long as it is accorded a central place in Islam, the militants are always going to be deemed more authentic, more true to the faith of Mohammed, than the reformers.
If correct, this makes the latest State Department policy all the more idiotic.
I still prefer the term Hirabis myself.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:30 AMNew (and apparently controversial) genetic evidence that dinosaurs (and particularly T. Rex) were closely related to birds.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:25 AM...that all comic books turned into movies must follow.
[Via Geek Press]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:10 AMFor Zimbabwe:
Everything in Mr. Mugabe's history suggests he will use whatever force is necessary to maintain his grip on power. As a rebel leader participating in the 1980 election, he promised to continue the country's civil war if he lost. Not long after taking power, he murdered some 30,000 members of the minority Ndebele tribe in what is known as the Matabeleland Massacre. In 2005, as punishment for voting against his ZANU-PF party, he destroyed the homes of 700,000 poor Zimbabweans. He has killed untold numbers of political opponents in the past and driven even more into exile.
Since so many of the country's security officials are prime beneficiaries of Mr. Mugabe's kleptocracy (and might be implicated for human-rights abuses were the regime to fall), it's doubtful that the military would ever allow a peaceful "velvet revolution" to transpire - as many speculated in the days after the election.In short, Mr. Mugabe's opponents need weapons soon. This is not to effect regime change, but for simple self-defense.
Hopefully, though, it would result in regime change as well. Jefferson famously said that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Well, there's been plenty of patriot blood shed there, but apparently there's an element lacking in the fertilizer. Monsters like Mugabe were exactly the kind of tyrants he had in mind.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:05 AMMark Whittington has a completely pointless post:
...not much remarked, is the implicit endorsement of NASA's Vision for Space Exploration by one of the leading new commercial space companies
Is this supposed to be news? Is Mark aware of any commercial space company that is opposed to the VSE, or sending humans to the moon and Mars? I'm not. So what's the big deal?
Or is he confusing ESAS with VSE again?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:28 PMDeroy Murdock writes on the ethanol scam, and its global effects on food and fuel prices.
[Update a few minutes later]
If this pans out, ethanol will make a lot more sense, won't be competing with food, and won't require any subsidies:
Along with cellulose, the cyanobacteria developed by Professor R. Malcolm Brown Jr. and Dr. David Nobles Jr. secrete glucose and sucrose. These simple sugars are the major sources used to produce ethanol.
"The cyanobacterium is potentially a very inexpensive source for sugars to use for ethanol and designer fuels," says Nobles, a research associate in the Section of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.Brown and Nobles say their cyanobacteria can be grown in production facilities on non-agricultural lands using salty water unsuitable for human consumption or crops.
Bring it on.
[Evening update]
David Freddoso has an appropriately outraged follow-up to the Murdock piece:
Our government's negligence and perhaps even malicious misdirection of societal resources toward a worthless, unwanted product -- ethanol -- will cause millions of people to go hungry tonight.
The way things are going, this could become the worst chapter yet in the sad, ruinous history of our bipartisan agricultural welfare programs. For those who write in and protest that free-market capitalism is an uncompassionate, un-Christian economic system, I submit that you are currently witnessing the alternative.
Indeed. End the tariffs, end the subsidies. Let the market work.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:15 PMWhat would we do without federal regulators?
Federal alcohol regulators thought differently. They have ordered Dillmann to stop selling beer bottles with caps that say "Try Legal Weed."
While reviewing the proposed label for Dillmann's latest beer, Lemurian Lager, the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau said the message on the caps he has been using for his five current beers amounts to a drug reference.In a letter explaining its decision, the agency, which regulates the brewing industry, said the wording could "mislead consumers about the characteristics of the alcoholic beverage."
Because, you know, a bottle of beer is so similar to a joint. I wonder how many bottles you'd have to drink before you really couldn't tell the difference?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:52 AMWell, maybe.
If Barack Obama had to be compared to a shoe product right now, it would have to be Crocs. These are the foam and vinyl casual shoes with the great big crocodile-like holes in them that everybody seemed to want six months ago. Today, it's hard to find very many people still willing to wear them. They are so last year.
Certainly what he's selling is a crock.
I do think that he's past his sell-by date. But I wish that people hadn't caught on to him until after the convention. There's enough potential buyers' remorse out there that Hillary! may yet pull it out.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:48 AMAnd it's not very civil. Here's a report from the front lines:
One of the things that makes this division in the Democratic ranks so intense is that each side of this demographic divide would prefer to win with as minimal help from the other side as possible. Read the pro-Obama blogs; their comments drip with contempt for the demographics in Hillary's coalition - the elderly, unions, Catholics, the white working class, etc. They see these folks as more socially conservative, resistant to radical change, and holding back the party from embracing its true progressive ideals.
(One other wrinkle - your average liberal blogger thinks our Middle East policy is way too deferential to Israel's interests, and bristles at what they see as pandering to Jewish voters, such as promising to "obliterate" those who would attack the Jewish state.)Meanwhile, the white working class, the elderly and Catholic tend to look at the Obama coalition - the young activists, African-Americans, and the latte-sipping university professors - with a certain amount of suspicion and distrust. All this talk of ethereal "change" and not enough how you'll help put more food on the table.
Also, heard from a smart conservative strategist a day or so ago... this is what happens when your party is made up of groups that want government to do things for them (and spend time and resources) vs. when your party is made up of groups that want government to get off their backs and go away.
I just keep munching popcorn.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:54 AMIs it time to give up on finding a vaccine for AIDS?
If the animal model is useless, that's going to make it very hard to test new ones. The only ethical way to do it would be to work with people who engage in risky behavior, and that's going to be very problematic in terms of getting credible results.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:50 AMTom Hayden agrees with me that Hillary! is deliberately sabotaging Obama's campaign.
I may have to rethink my position now.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:45 AMAre all of Hillary's negatives really already "all out there", as Lanny Davis spins? Rich Lowry thinks not:
The problem with this (and I'm more sympathetic to Hillary than Obama at this point) is that Hillary's negatives aren't "all out there." She's perfectly capable of creating new, damaging ones, as she did with the Bosnia story. Plus, Bill is always a wild card, in terms of what he's going to say, what is going to be revealed about his business dealings, etc.
It actually goes beyond that. We don't have to speculate on new revelations for Hillary to have big problems if she somehow snatches the nomination from Obama.
Throughout the nineties, the classic Clinton tactical response to discussion about their corruption or criminality was to say "that's old news." And it often, even usually, worked, given the degree to which the press was in the tank for them. And that will surely be their response if anyone brings up Cattlegate, the White House travel office, the missing billing records, the FBI files, "who hired Craig Livingstone," Whitewater in general, etc. And we can be assured that these things (and particularly their abuse of women) will come up, because the Slick Grope Vets for Truth have pledged to make them come up if she gets the nomination. I assume that they've been keeping their powder dry during the nomination process, both because they want any revelations they have to have maximum impact in the fall, when people are paying attention, and because they wouldn't have much effect on Democrat voters.
But if she does get the nomination, and Gennifer, Kathleen et al do make an issue of their treatment at the hands of both Bill and Hill, as I've written before, I don't think the "it's old news" gambit will fly, partly because it's become too old:
One of the tactics that the Clintons used to use to deflect bad news was to leak something on a Friday afternoon, and hope that it would die down after the weekend. Then if anyone brought it up, they'd dismiss it as "that's old news."
Given how ignorant much of the public remains of all the Clinton scandals that they successfully buried in the nineties, I wonder if this "old news" tactic will continue to work if things like Travelgate are brought up as issues in a 2008 campaign. I've already noted that Hillary will have her own "Slick Grope Vets" problem if she runs....It occurs to me that the "that's old news" defense may not work, particularly with the "Slick Grope Vets For Truth," at least based on the Kerry experience. After all, what could be older news than his congressional testimony after Vietnam? Yet it did become a potent campaign issue.
Many of today's young voters have no memory of the Clinton scandals. An eighteen-year old was only eight years old during the Lewinsky saga, and a toddler during the early scandals and Whitewater. Even today's twenty-somethings weren't paying that much attention at the time, and even if they were, they always got the Clinton spin in the MSM, not the vast amount of information available via the Internet and talk radio (and to a lesser degree, Fox News). So for them, it won't be old news, or at least, it will be a revelation of history, of which they were previously unaware.
And this time, with the blogosphere, the MSM won't be able to help her spin her way out as it did in the nineties. No, I don't think that Hillary's negatives are "all out there." We can expect a massive replay, and reminder, if she gets the nomination, and to a lot of people, the "old news" will become new news, or more simply, news.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:49 AMPhil Bowermaster (along with Jerry Pournelle) has some thoughts about Intelligent Design, panspermia and simulated universes. How would one go about looking for the easter eggs, if they exist? Sagan had an interesting one, in Contact
Well, not all of it, but quite a bit. Rob Coppinger has some thoughts on the issue of ISS downmass requirements, which is something that doesn't get as much attention as the launch payload. Once Shuttle goes away, we lose an awful lot of downmass capability, at least in theory, though I don't think we've been returning all that much in it lately.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:23 AMJeff Foust has a brief report on the next steps for Spaceport America, now that the vote is out of the way.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AMProcurement "irregularities" at Marshall Space Flight Center? On the Ares program?
Why, who could ever imagine such a thing? Particularly after it got off to such a completely non-corrupt start, with no conflicts of interest at all, via Scott "Revolving Door" Horowitz.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:14 AMI really don't want to know about Eliot Spitzer's s3xual proclivities.
I'm just glad that he's no longer any threat to become president. And the fact that New York elected him governor (and Hillary! and Chuck Schumer Senators) is one of the many reasons that I'd never want to move to that state.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:11 AMFrank J. says that too much is expected of us. I liked this comment:
Hell yea! Why do we always have to be the "reasonable" ones; for once I just want to forget about the real issues, the constitution, and logic, and just vote for someone who looks like me, or has the same plumbing.
Hey, you can do it. Just become a Democrat.
This one, too, from a "Peg C.":
Let's see: Blacks vote 95% - 5% for Obama, women must be voting something like 60 - 40 for Hillary (not sure but every idiot female I work with is for Hillary), white Dem men (yes, I know - oxymoron) are voting 45 - 55 for Obama...and white men are the racists and sexists?? Only in Nora Ephron's fantasy world...
Unfortunately, a lot of people reside in Nora Ephron's fantasy world.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:05 AMDo the superdelegates mind if Obama loses? If not, then it makes Hillary!'s uphill battle even steeper.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:19 AMHere's more on Barack Obama's crazy uncle and aunt, whom he couldn't choose.
Right? I mean, you can't choose your relatives.
What? They're not relatives? He chose them?
Well, so what?
Stop asking questions, and let me eat my waffle.
[Update after 10 PM EDT]
Here is a link roundup about Obama's terrorist friends.
Which is quite ironic, given that Obama's entry in the race will now almost certainly presage a repeat of the 1968 Chicago convention, except that it will instead be in the mile-high city.
[Thursday morning update]
Is Obama's "official campaign blogger" a Marxist?
I certainly wouldn't be shocked. It's all of a pattern. It's that new politics, doncha know?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:20 PMSome @n@l orifice is sending out spam using my long-time email address as the return address. So I get all the bounces. Typically, it's about a thousand emails, in addition to the usual spam, and this is the third time this week (which makes me wonder how many of them don't bounce, and actually get through). And I can't filter it, because I have to know if email bounces, in case someone I was actually trying to send email to bounced.
But when these attacks happen, I have to just delete it all, because life is too short to go through them on the off chance that one in a thousand will actually be a legitimate bounced email.
I know Clark's law (no, not Clarke's Laws). The one that says that any sufficiently advanced amount of cluelessness is indistinguishable from malice, but it's hard for me to believe that this is not intentional. I don't know if my having to deal with all of this extraneous unfilterable email is the intent, or it's just a side effect of the desire to make me look like a purveyor of p3nis enlargement devices and drugs.
Anyway, if I seem unusually testy, you know why.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:37 PMThe day after her decisive win in Pennsylvania, Hillary! has picked up a previously uncommitted superdelegate.
We'll see if this is just a single event, or the start of a tipping point. As Victor Davis Hanson notes (and I've been pointing out for months), the Dems are in horrid position for November (one in which they put themselves, largely because of dumb primary rules, an idiotic decision by Howard Dean to not seat the Michigan and Florida delegates, and their decades-long indulgence and encouragement of identity politics).
The Democrats are tottering at the edge of the abyss. They are about to nominate someone who cannot win, despite vastly out-spending his opponent, any of the key large states -- CA, NJ, NY, OH, PENN, TX, etc. -- that will determine the fall election. And yet not to nominate him will cause the sort of implosion they saw in 1968 or the sort of mess we saw in November 2000.
Hillary won't quit, since she knows that Obama, when pressure mounts, is starting to show a weird sort of petulance, and drops the "new politics" for snideness. And at any given second, a Rev. Wright outburst, an Ayers reappearance, another Michelle 'never been proud' moment, or another condescending Obamism can cause him to nose dive and become even more snappy.They won't be able to force Hillary out since she still has strong arguments -- the popular vote may end up dead even, or even in her favor; while he won caucuses and out-of-play states, she won the critical fall battlegrounds -- and by plebiscites; she is the more experienced and more likely to run a steady national campaign; she wins the Reagan Democrats that will determine the fall election; and by other, more logical nomination rules (like the Republicans' fewer caucuses, winner-take-all elections) she would have already wrapped it up. There seems something unfair, after all, for someone to win these mega-states and end up only with a few extra delegates for the effort. The more this drags out, the more Obama and Hillary get nastier and more estranged from each other -- at precisely the time one must take the VP nomination to unite the party.
If Obama is perceived to have been denied the nomination by the party elders because he is "unelectable" (which his followers will interpret to mean, too black, too "progressive," etc.) there will be days of rage in Denver, and lot of potential Democrat votes sitting at home in the fall. The best hope that they have at this point is for Obama to continue to lose the rest of the primaries, in which case Hillary can at least claim that he has "lost momentum" and that she has gained it, and will be the stronger candidate. If the perception is that Obama was thrown under the bus because of Reverend Wright and Bill Ayers, and the fact that not everyone agrees with the left about Obama's theories of false consciousness of the embittered, batten down the hatches. It will be an(other) ugly year for Democrats, and this time there will be no Nixon to save them.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:02 PMAre you ready for a new glacial advance?
It is generally not possible to draw conclusions about climatic trends from events in a single year, so I would normally dismiss this cold snap as transient, pending what happens in the next few years.
This is where SOHO comes in. The sunspot number follows a cycle of somewhat variable length, averaging 11 years. The most recent minimum was in March last year. The new cycle, No.24, was supposed to start soon after that, with a gradual build-up in sunspot numbers.It didn't happen. The first sunspot appeared in January this year and lasted only two days. A tiny spot appeared last Monday but vanished within 24 hours. Another little spot appeared this Monday. Pray that there will be many more, and soon.
The reason this matters is that there is a close correlation between variations in the sunspot cycle and Earth's climate. The previous time a cycle was delayed like this was in the Dalton Minimum, an especially cold period that lasted several decades from 1790.
Northern winters became ferocious: in particular, the rout of Napoleon's Grand Army during the retreat from Moscow in 1812 was at least partly due to the lack of sunspots.
That the rapid temperature decline in 2007 coincided with the failure of cycle No.24 to begin on schedule is not proof of a causal connection but it is cause for concern.
It is time to put aside the global warming dogma, at least to begin contingency planning about what to do if we are moving into another little ice age, similar to the one that lasted from 1100 to 1850.
It might be a PITA to dike Florida and Bangladesh, but it would be a lot easier than staving off half a mile of encroaching ice in the upper midwest and Europe. Crank up your SUV and build some new coal plants before it's too late!
[Update later afternoon]
Well, it's good news in the near term at least, for those living out west, which has had a drought for the past few years. This year was the biggest snow pack in this millennium.
[Thursday morning update]
The criticism begins.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:39 AMOr should it be "wither VSE and ESAS"?
My analysis on what the presidential election could mean for NASA's current plans for human spaceflight, over at Popular Mechanics.
Bottom line: don't expect "steady as you go..."
[Update late evening]
Mark Whittington has his usual (i.e., idiotic) response:
The problem here is that without a lot of those billions being spent not only on technology development, but operational experience, it will be a long time before private business gets us to the Moon, if at all. And we they do get there, they may have to have visas signed by the Chinese who will have beaten everyone there.
Yes, [rolling eyes] having to have visas signed by the Chinese to land on the moon should be our biggest concern. Not the fact that NASA has chosen an architecture that is fundamentally incapable of establishing a fully-fledged lunar presence and is unlikely to survive politically (and ignoring the fact that the Chinese are on a track to get a human on the moon sometime in the next century, at their current rate...).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:21 AMStanley Kurtz says that it has driven the Democrat primary to an unprecedented degree. I agree that neither Obama or Hillary! would be front runners were he not black, and she not a woman. Of course, in her case, even being a woman wasn't enough. She had to be a woman who married, and stuck by (including violating most of the premises of feminism) Bill Clinton.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:58 AMA new class of high-temperature superconductors:
According to Steven Kivelson, a theoretical physicist at Stanford, "[there exist] enough similarities that it's a good working hypothesis that they're parts of the same thing." However, not everyone hopes the mechanism is the same. Philip Anderson, a Nobel Laureate and theoretical physicist at Princeton, says that an entirely new mechanism of superconductivity would be far more important than if they mimicked the current understanding of superconductivity. "If it's really a new mechanism, God knows where it will go," says Anderson.
Let's hope.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:04 AMRich Lowry wonders:
She's preparing the demographic ground for McCain, by getting white working-class Democrats used to (if you will) not voting for Obama. And she's softening Obama up for McCain, prodding at and exposing her fellow Democrats' weaknesses.
The following is predicated on the assumptions (for which I think that there's a ton of evidence) that: a) Hillary! is all about power for Hillary! and b) the fortunes of the Democrat Party come a distant second to that.
If Obama wins the election, even if his presidency is disastrous, it makes it very tough for her to run again in four years. Ted Kennedy tried it against Jimmy Carter, and it badly damaged the party in the 1980 election. And Hillary has nowhere near the reserve of goodwill among party regulars that Ted Kennedy does, so if she is perceived to be damaging the prospects for a reelection of a Democrat, it could be the end for her.
But when Obama loses (and particularly if he loses McGovern style, which is not at all unlikely), she'll be able to say "I told you so," and she'll be positioned for another run at the nomination in 2012 (she'll only be sixty four).
Thus, based on the above logic, Hillary!'s preferences are, in this order: a) to win the nomination, b) for McCain to win the election and c) for Obama to win the election.
So what she has to do (on the assumption that Obama is going to be the nominee) is to help McCain win without it being obvious that she's doing so. Fortunately for her, the same things that she has to do to continue to fight for the nomination, all the way to the convention, are the things that will continue to strengthen McCain, and weaken Obama in the general. So she can maintain plausible deniability. And after the convention, most of the damage will have been done, so she can go through the motions of supporting Obama.
And if by some miracle, the stalking horse learns to sing, and she gets the nomination? Like what happens if she loses Super Tuesday, she'll worry about that when it happens.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:32 AMI haven't had time to read it yet, but Dennis Wingo has a long essay on NASA's forty-year failure to close the deal with the American people. More thoughts when I have a chance to read, but some of the other folks here may be interested.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:01 AMSome rapidly evolving lizards have been discovered on an Adriatic island:
The transplanted lizards adapted to their new environment in ways that expedited their evolution physically, Irschick explained.
Pod Mrcaru, for example, had an abundance of plants for the primarily insect-eating lizards to munch on. Physically, however, the lizards were not built to digest a vegetarian diet.Researchers found that the lizards developed cecal valves--muscles between the large and small intestine--that slowed down food digestion in fermenting chambers, which allowed their bodies to process the vegetation's cellulose into volatile fatty acids.
"They evolved an expanded gut to allow them to process these leaves," Irschick said, adding it was something that had not been documented before. "This was a brand-new structure."
Along with the ability to digest plants came the ability to bite harder, powered by a head that had grown longer and wider.
It will be interesting to see not only if there is a genetic basis for this change, but if they can still interbreed with the original species. If not, that's called a "new species," folks.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:14 AMObama brings a whole new meaning to the term:
Democratic White House contender Barack Obama could not hide his irritation Monday when asked by a reporter what he thought about former president Jimmy Carter's meeting with Hamas last week.
"Why can't I just eat my waffle?" the Illinois senator said as he ate breakfast in Scranton, Pennsylvania, according to MSNBC television pictures.
Pressed again for an answer, he replied: "Just let me eat my waffle."
Hey, nobody held a gun and made you run for president, Barack. At least, as far as I know...
I hope that Jimmy Carter has as prominent a box at the convention as he did in 2004. And he invites Michael Moore again.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:57 AMApparently, the Soyuz entered hatch first, instead of leading with the heat shield, and burned off an antenna. I hate when that happens.
Yi said during a news conference at the Star City cosmonaut training center outside Moscow that she was frightened. "At first I was really scared because it looked really, really hot and I thought we could burn," she said.
I'll bet it was some serious pucker in that capsule for all three of them.
As the article notes, this is the second time in a row they've had a non-nominal entry, and the third time in five years. Is their quality, in manufacturing or launch processing, declining? Not good news if we're reliant on them for transportation after 2010. And no, I don't think the problem was too many women aboard (what an idiot).
Faster please, Elon.
[Update a few minutes later]
Jim Oberg shares my concerns about Russian quality problems. And he's in a lot better position to know.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:10 PMNo, not in Pennsylvania (though they're having an election there as well today, so I hear). In New Mexico. Will Spaceport America get funded?
[8 PM EDT update]
We should know in a couple hours whether or not it passed, unless it's very close, because polls close in less than an hour.
[9 PM EDT update]
The polls are closed now. This is probably the best place to track results. Folks in Las Cruces have a lot at stake in the vote. There are also a of related stories there.
[11 PM EDT update]
Looks like a big vote of confidence. Two to one for the tax (and the spaceport) is what I'm hearing. This is good news for Steve Landeen, who might have been out of a job had it gone the other way.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:12 AMYou know, it may be hard to find a candidate who doesn't belong to a church whose leader delivers eyebrow-singing speeches on the evils of America and also built a house Jim Bakker would approve, and it may be hard to find a candidate who doesn't move with ease in the same social circles as some people who bombed the Pentagon, but it can't be that hard to find one who doesn't do both.
Apparently, if you're a Democrat, it is.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:02 AMJudging from the carbon emitted from eating food in the US, food represents about 5% of the carbon usage. It's a higher percentage in developing countries, but the power uses of carbon are very valuable and inelastic. By figuring out how to turn food into fuel and doing so for the most expensive fuel at $4.00/gallon, we drive up the price of food to $6 per bushel as a bushel of corn can produce 2.8 gallons of ethanol and $1.42 in ethanol subsidies which has the energy content of 2 gallons of gasoline of which 2/3 of the cost is the petroleum.
So people living on $1/day can only afford 9 pounds of corn if they can find it wholesale in such small lots. 1 pound is 2400 calories. I guess the high corn price is exposing poor financing, competition, distribution and economic incentives in countries with food riots, rather than simply first world corn consumption subsidies.
Posted by Sam Dinkin at 09:06 AMLee Cary is concerned. I'm not, mostly because I don't think that Obama has a chance in hell of winning, but also because I don't believe that Ares/Orion is "the way forward," so it's hard for me to be very upset about either a delay, or cancellation.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:48 AMThe Great White North, where boys will be boys, and the sheep are nervous.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:33 AM[Update a few minutes later]
Alan Boyle has a link roundup of commentary on the movie.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:31 AMNorm Geras says that he didn't leave the left--the left left him.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 AMMickey Kaus says that Obama, like himself, is a vulgar Marxist.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:18 AMVirginia Postrel writes about the economic ignorance of the global warm-mongers, a group that unfortunately includes all three presidential candidates. I just hope that Phil Gramm or someone can get McCain to come to his senses on the issue once he's actually in office.
The connection between higher prices for energy and reduced carbon dioxide emissions may not have hit the national consciousness yet, but the LAT's Margo Roosevelt reports that California utilities--and eventually their customers--are beginning to realize this isn't just a symbolic issue.
...The DWP, to whom I pay my electric bills, wants out of the carbon dioxide caps. It apparently thinks the law shouldn't apply to socialist enterprises.
Isn't that always the way? The laws are for "the little people."
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:05 AMIn the comments section of a post public support for the space program over at Space Politics, a twenty something asks a damed good question:
Those who support the current lunar program often forget the opportunity costs. There are better ways to spend the same money on developing space. I'm 24 - with the current Constellation program plan, I'll be in my mid 30s by the time we get back to the moon. If we operate the system for a decade or two after that, as is likely, all I can expect in my career is to see 4 people land on the moon twice a year. That is not exciting - nor is it worth the money. Maybe by the time I retire we'll be looking at another "next generation system".
What's the point of any of this for someone my age?
Well, it's been more than a couple decades since I was twenty something, but it seems like there's even less point for someone my age. Why in the world does Mike Griffin think that anyone, other than those getting a paycheck from it, are going to be inspired by such a trivial goals?
Of course, as usual, we heard the typical chorus of "space is hard, and it will take a long time, and you're doing it for your grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, or great-great-great...grandchildren."
But it doesn't have to be this way. There was nothing inevitable about ESAS, and it isn't written in granite that government space programs must do the least possible with the greatest amount of money, and the money invested provide such a poor return in either output or future capability on which to build. It is likely that this will be the case, but it's not inevitable. As I've said many times, we won't have a sensible government space program until space (that is, actual progress in space, not jobs in certain districts) becomes politically important. The last time that occurred was in the 1960s, and even then, it wasn't politically important to have sustainable progress--only a specific space achievement (and that only because it had almost arbitrarily become a technological gladiatorial arena).
Anyway, Jon Goff followed up with a good comment, and then a blog post on the subject:
If our current approach to space development was actually putting in place the technology and infrastructure needed to make our civilization a spacefaring one, I'd be a lot more willing to support it. Wise investments in the future are a good thing, but NASA's current approach is not a wise investment in the future. It's aging hipsters trying to relive the glory days of their youth at my generation's expense.
Patience is only a virtue when you're headed in the right direction and doing the right thing. If Constellation was truly (as Marburger put it) making future operations cheaper, safer, and more capable, then I'd be all for patiently seeing it out.While Constellation might possibly put some people on the moon, it won't actually put us any closer to routine, affordable, and sustainable exploration and development. I have no problem with a long hard road, just so long as its the right one.
Unfortunately, it comes back to the fact that we never have had that serious national debate about space, and why we have a space program, that we so badly need (and despite his wishy-washy words now, I doubt that it will happen in an Obama administration, either). As the Chesire Cat said, if you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:09 AMMark Steyn has some trenchant thoughts on guns, God and American exceptionalism:
Sen. Obama's remarks about poor dumb, bitter rural losers "clinging to" guns and God certainly testify to the instinctive snobbery of a big segment of the political class. But we shouldn't let it go by merely deploring coastal condescension toward the knuckledraggers. No, what Michelle Malkin calls Crackerquiddick (quite rightly - it's more than just another dreary "-gate") is not just snobbish nor even merely wrongheaded. It's an attack on two of the critical advantages the United States holds over most of the rest of the Western world. In the other G7 developed nations, nobody clings to God 'n' guns. The guns got taken away, and the Europeans gave up on churchgoing once they embraced Big Government as the new religion.
How's that working out? Compared with America, France and Germany have been more or less economically stagnant for the past quarter-century, living permanently with unemployment rates significantly higher than in the United States.Has it made them any less "bitter," as Obama characterizes those Pennsylvanian crackers? No. In my book "America Alone," just out in paperback and available in all good bookstores - you'll find it in Borders propping up the wonky rear leg of the display table for the smash new CD "Michelle Obama And The San Francisco Macchiato Chorus Sing "I Pinned My Pink Slip To The Gun Rack Of My Pick-Up,' 'My Dog Done Died, My Wife Jus' Left Me, And Michael Dukakis Is Strangely Reluctant To Run Again,' Plus 'I Swung By The Economic Development Zone Business Park But The Only Two Occupied Rental Units Were Both Evangelical Churches' And Other Embittered Appalachian Favorites."
Where was I? Oh, yes. In my book "America Alone," I note a global survey on optimism: 61 percent of Americans were optimistic about the future, 29 percent of the French, 15 percent of Germans. Take it from a foreigner: In my experience, Americans are the least "bitter" people in the developed world. Secular, gun-free big-government Europe doesn't seem to have done anything for people's happiness.
Read (as usual) the whole thing.
[Update a couple minutes later]
I don't think this is unrelated:
I am going to take a bold step in a brand new direction and offer the notion that working class Americans aren't idiots. People who wonder where the Democratic vision of prosperity through higher taxes and stricter regulation would take us need look no further than Europe. And I will echo Michelle Obama by saying that in my adult lifetime I have never been proud of Europe's ability to create jobs or absorb immigrants.
Nor have I. Perhaps the Obamas are, though.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 PMSometimes, you just have to think that these people's brains are broken.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:29 PMDerb has some thoughts:
As so often with creationist material, I'm not sure what the point is. Darwin's great contribution to human knowledge, his theory of the origin of species, is either true, or it's not. Is David saying: "When taken up by evil people, the theory had evil consequences. Therefore the theory must be false"? Is he asserting, in other words, that a true theory about the world could not possibly have evil consequence, no matter who picked it up and played with it, with no matter how little real understanding? Does David think that true facts cannot possibly be used for malign purposes? If that is what David is asserting, it seems to me an awfully hard proposition to defend. It is a true fact that E = mc2, and the Iranians are right at this moment using that true fact to construct nuclear weapons. If they succeed, and use their weapons for horrible purposes, will that invalidate the Special Theory of Relativity?
If David does not think that Darwin's explanation for the origin of species is correct, let him give us his reasons; or better yet, an alternative explanation that we can test by observation. That a wicked man invoked Darwin's name as an excuse to do wicked things tells us nothing, nada, zero, zippo, zilch about the truth content of Darwin's ideas.
I always have to scratch my head at conservatives who are perfectly comfortable with Adam Smith's invisible hand when it comes to markets, but can't get their heads around the concept of emergent properties in the development of life. And of course, the opposite is true for liberalsfascists.
[Evening update]
Jonah Goldberg has more defense of Darwin (and Einstein). Bottom line, with which I agree:
Nazism was reactionary in that it sought to repackage tribal values under the guise of modern concepts. So was Communism. So are all the statist and collectivism isms. The only truly new and radical political revolution is the Lockean one. But, hey, I've got a book on all this stuff.
He does indeed
...and I'm ready to move to Paulville. Abortions will be outlawed there, presumably. But it won't be sending any troops to Iraq.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:53 PMIt will be interesting to see how how NBC (and Dan Abrams) respond to this:
As a matter of fact, I had other things to occupy my time in the White House in 2002 rather than "structuring" a campaign for an Alabama gubernatorial candidate, calling people to raise money for his race, and going through the arduous task of "putting together a strategy." And I certainly didn't meet with anyone at the Justice Department or either of the two U.S. Attorneys in Alabama about investigating or indicting Siegelman. My involvement in the campaign was to approve a request that the President appear at a Riley campaign fundraising event, one of several score fundraising events the President did that election cycle.
It boils down to this: as a journalist, do you feel you have a responsibility to dig into the claims made by your guests, seek out evidence and come to a professional judgment as to the real facts? Or do you feel if a charge is breathtaking enough, thoroughly checking it out isn't a necessity?I know you might be concerned that asking these questions could restrict your ability to make sensational charges on the air, but don't you think you have a responsibility to provide even a shred of supporting evidence before sullying the journalistic reputations of MSNBC and NBC?
People used to believe journalists were searching for the truth. But your cable show increasingly seems to be focused on wishful thinking, hoping something is one way and diminishing the search for facts and evidence in favor of repeating your fondest desires.
So what else is new?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:28 PMJules Crittenden says let the left have their draft.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:04 PMJonah Goldberg's book
The election campaign itself was the most rigorously fought in Italy since its liberation from Fascist rule in 1944. Berlusconi, often portrayed by the media as something of a clown if not a conjurer of tricks, put the case for a market-based capitalist and democratic system in simple but powerful terms.
His rival, former Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, leader of the new Democratic Party, succeeded in putting forward the case for a social-democratic system, with the state playing the central role as a distributor of wealth and welfare.Berlusconi spoke of discipline, family values, hard work and individual generosity. Veltroni countered with his talk of solidarity, sharing and collective compassion.
Text coloration mine. All of the red rhetoric could have come right out of Benito Mussolini's playbook. The green stuff is "right wing."
With this defeat, and the complete political demise of one of the oldest and most extreme fascist movements--the Communist Party--perhaps the Italians have finally laid the old socialist to rest.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:59 AMIf this report is true, it looks like NASA is not going to hit its milestone of the first test flight of the Potemkin RocketAres 1-X vehicle planned for a year from now:
Ares I-X now has little chance of making its April, 2009 launch date target, initially due to the delay of STS-125's flight to October.
The first Ares related test flight requires the freeing of High Bay 3 inside the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) and Pad 39B - which will first host STS-125's Launch On Need (LON) rescue shuttle (Endeavour/LON-400) - being vacated for modifications ahead of Ares I-X.However, a new problem has now come to light with the MLP (Mobile Launch Platform) that will be handed over from Shuttle to Constellation for the test flight. This problem relates to the stability of Ares I-X during rollout to the Pad.
The modifications to the MLP initially called for Ares I-X to be placed on one set of the existing Shuttle's Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) hold down posts, with a tower to be erected on the other set of hold down posts - with support for the vehicle between the tower and the interstage level.
When NASA changed contractors for the MLP work associated with Ares I-X, the design changed, omitting the adjacent tower, instead relying on three steel cables - 120 degrees apart - to help hold the vehicle steady during rollout.
Given the projected weight of the vehicle at rollout - with a heavy dummy upper stage - additional stability is now being called for, leading to a redesign of the MLP support structure.
In combination with the projected delay to handing over Shuttle resources post STS-125, internal scheduling is showing 60 to 90 days worth of delay to Ares I-X's projected launch date.
Gee, it's always something. Guess that's what happens when you come up with a new vehicle concept with a ridiculously high aspect ratio, that makes a whip antenna look positively zaftig. Has anyone ever had to use guy wires on a rocket before, or is this another proud first for our nation's space agency?
Anyway, as it goes on to point out, this probably will waterfall down through the whole schedule, further increasing the dreaded "gap." Not that it will matter that much, once the budget gets whacked in the next administration, regardless of who is president. But then, maybe if they'd come up with an implementation that actually appeared to have some relevance to peoples' lives, instead of redoing people's grandfather's space program, they'd get more public support, instead of ever less.
It's hard to see how this ends well, at least for fans of Apollo on Steroids. But it's mostly irrelevant to those of us who want to see large-scale human expansion into space. That will have to await the private sector.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:22 AMWith a computer mouse, you can precisely position the cursor wherever you want. The motion of the cursor exactly mimics the motion of the mouse in your hand. It is a positional controller.
But in many computer games, you have no direct control over position. The joystick controller only controls the rate of motion. You have to provide a direction, and speed, and hope that it will get to the desired location at the desired time. As anyone who has played such games knows, position control using a rate controller is much less precise, and often not even accurate if you're not a good judge of such things.
In last night's political debate (as in almost all discussions of this topic), there was a lot of talk about "cutting taxes," and "raising taxes." Not to pick on him in particular, but as an example, here's the reporting by Jim Geraghty:
Hillary laughs heartily at McCain's comment about "they're going to raise your taxes, and they have the aud-ic-i-ty, the audacity, to hope you don't mind!"
With her laugh, she triggered a thousand primal screams on liberal blogs.Steph asks if she'll make a pledge to never raise taxes for those making under $200,000 per year. She says she's "absolutely committed to not raising taxes on those making less than $200,000."
Obama echoes the pledge, and says he'll cut taxes for those folks.
I don't trust either, but I'm rather surprised that they both were willing to be pinned down in the equivalent of "read my lips, no new taxes."
Wow. Charlie Gibson notes that when the capital gains taxes were cut under both Clinton and Bush, revenues went up.
These are the GREATEST DEBATE QUESTIONS EVER.
Wow. Hillary: "I would not raise the capital gains tax above 20 percent, if I would raise it at all... I don't want to raise taxes on everyone." She rips Obama's plan to raise payroll taxes.
Emphasis mine, in all cases. Every one of these statements is absurd. No one, not the mighty Hillary, not the saintly Obama, has the power to raise or cut taxes. They don't have a tax revenue controller. All they can do is increase or decrease tax rates. And they can't predict with certainty whether or not this will increase, or decrease "taxes" (that is, tax revenues). The absurdity of leaving out this key word is demonstrated starkly in Charlie Gibson's statement: "when the capital gains taxes were cut, revenues went up." How can that be? If taxes are cut, by definition, revenues have to go down. But if he had said that when capital gains tax rates are cut, revenues go up, this is perfectly sensible (though counterintuitive to people who don't understand that tax rates modify behavior).
I expect Democrats (and journalists, who are generally Democrats) to play such word games, but I'm always disappointed when Republicans and so-called conservatives go along with it. People who want lower tax rates (and a more vibrant economy) have to demand them, and stop talking about lower taxes. Yes, it would be nice to cut off funding to the federal government (at least if we could get spending under control), but that's a separate issue. By conflating tax revenues with tax rates, we grant far too much power to the big government types, when we should instead be pointing out their powerlessness. There are many unintended consequences of government action, and it is always useful to point out that this is just one more--that the federal government cannot directly control how much it taxes people (that is, how much money it actually confiscates)--it can only control the the rate at which it does so.
This is just one more example of how we small-government types have to start taking back the language.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:43 AMMost of my readers will find this of no interest at all, but I just ran across a new blog dedicated to remembering the good old days in Flint, Michigan. Nostalgic memories abound.
The population trend in the sidebar is depressing. When I was a kid it had a population of almost two hundred thousand, and there was an ongoing feud with Grand Rapids over whether it or Flint was the second largest city in the state (after Detroit, of course, which had its own hemorrhage of people). Now it's down to just a little over half that.
[Update in the evening]
OK, again, unless you're from southeast Michigan, this will be meaningless, but via the blog above, I found a coney blog. That actually understands the difference between Flint and Detroit style.
And there are those who say that it's a lost art. For many, Angelo's defined the Flint coney island, and once he died (my father was in the hospital with him at the same time, as they both had heart attacks in the late sixties), it became franchised, and lost the magic. But my mother used to tell me (and we even went there when I was young) that the original Flint Coney Island, on Saginaw, north of downtown, was the best. But it went under decades ago.
Anyway, I'm glad to hear that it's a hit in Phoenix. Maybe we can keep the brand alive.
My darling Patricia doesn't understand the appeal. But then, she's not a fan of raw onions. Nor is she a fan of me after I ingest them. But once in a while, I have to indulge, consequences be damned...
Posted by Rand Simberg at 01:40 PMNASA apparently plans its first Ares flight test a year from today.
The April 2009 flight will be the first of four test fights for the rocket's first stage, derived from the current space shuttle's solid-rocket boosters. In particular, NASA hopes the flight will validate measures it is now undertaking to quell an anticipated vibration issue in the booster system, which could pose problems down the line for the survivability of later variants of the rocket.
The flight will also demonstrate the abilities of the first-stage flight control systems to keep the "single stick" rocket on course, without the benefit of control fin surfaces.For the first test flight, NASA will use a four-segment booster, topped with an empty fifth segment. Replicas of an Ares 1 second stage, Orion space capsule and launch abort system rocket will ride up top. The dummy segments will feature correct exterior detailing for aerodynamics testing, and will weigh about the same as their real-life counterparts.
"It's made to look a lot like the Ares 1 vehicle, but it's a very different animal," said NASA lead ground operations engineer Tassos Abadiotakis. "We're also going to get some aerodynamics data, some thermal data -- just the basic rocketry laws to make sure what we're proposing to go fly for Ares 1 actually is going to perform as advertised."
OK, so, if it's "a very different animal," how is it going to validate the real animal? I thought that the concern with the vibration was the fact that they've never flown a five-segment booster, and don't know what its resonant modes will be. I don't see how flying an four-segment booster with an empty casing on top resolves those concerns in any way. Why can't they fly a five-segment booster? Presumably because it won't be far enough along in development to allow a test flight a year from now.
And will the upper stage be just a dummy mass, or will it be active? I thought that the Ares was supposed to get roll control from the upper stage, since it has no way of doing it with the booster (as the article points out, it has no fins, and even if it did, they'd be useless once it left the atmosphere). The first stage can control pitch and yaw through gimbaling, but absent some kind of control jets on the circumference, there's no way for it to control roll on its own.
So, just what is it that this test is supposed to accomplish? Other, of course, than getting something on the pad and flying it to maintain program momentum at a time that a new administration is coming in and considering what to do with it?
[Update on Thursday morning]
I've gotten more than one private email from program insiders that this is a political stunt, not a useful engineering test.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:44 PMRobert Ferrigno imagines a future both frightening and amusing, in which Bill Clinton pines for the past. The only part that doesn't ring true is Bill and Hillary divorcing. If they divorced, they could be compelled to testify against each other, and neither of them would want to give up spousal immunity.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:53 AMIn Monday's part 1 of "VSE and the Retirement of Baby Boomers," Charles Miller and Jeff Foust port the conventional wisdom about budgeting to the space discussion. These are two of the most well-read, connected and smart people on space topics. I'd like to give folks addressing this issue some more texture to add some items that are not part of the conventional intergenerational budget debate which can be summarized perennially as "vote for me or things will all go to hell pretty soon if they aren't already there", but every year real personal income rises and real government spending minus interest payments rise; life expectancy goes up and almost all the Cassandras are proven wrong, but by then they've long since moved on to the next pending calamity. Here are the unconventional texture points:
It seems like Barack Obama shares a problem with Hillary!--a faulty memory when it comes to shady dealings and associates:
Dem presidential contender Barack Obama's handlers may be telling the press Obama has NO "recollection" of a 2004 party at influence peddler Tony Rezko's Wilmette house, but a top Sneed source claims Obama not only gave Rezko's guest of honor, Iraqi billionaire Nadhmi Auchi, a big welcome . . . but he made a few toasts!
Hey, maybe he just drank so many toasts that he blacked out the memory. Maybe in addition to giving up smoking, he should join AA?
Must be that "new politics" I've heard so much about.
And Victor Davis Hanson says that Obama (and Michelle, and Jeremiah) just keep on digging:
The American people will forgive slips, even condescension IF they are followed by genuine apology and not repeated ad infinitum. But in this case, there will be a growing weariness, followed by anger, at the notion that a Presidential candidate thinks he can say whatever he wishes, associate with whomever he wants, and feel it's the electorate's, not his own, ensuing problem. So the rub for the Obama campaign is not simply that he has no experience outside the Ivy League and Chicago, or even that he made a Faustian bargain with the Trinity church to jump-start his career, but rather his hubris this spring -- which as we speak is bringing on a summer nemesis.
I'm hoping for a fall nemesis, myself.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:42 AM...since the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. This is why Pennsylvanians (and other Americans, in every state) want to keep their guns, and won't vote for people who want to take them away, not because they lost their jobs. And one always has to question the motivations of a politician who professes the desire to see an unarmed populace.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:54 PMJonah Goldberg defends Obama. Well, OK, not really. But he does defend elitism:
In his telling Pennsylvania was once Belgium on the Susquehanna -- cheese parties, Sam Harris book clubs etc -- and it can be again if only these people get good enough jobs to lay down their guns and bibles. As just about everyone has observed by now, this is a fundamentally Marxist way of looking at the world and Obama deserves to be called on it.
But it's not elitist, not really. It's clearly snobbish. It's certainly myopic and arrogant. And it's absolutely wrong. But I don't think it's elitist. Maybe I'm biased because I don't have any pressing problem with elitism, rightly understood. Elite derives from the Latin for elect and in our elections we decide who will be our (political) elite. Jefferson believed in a democratic elite which rose up on merit. I do too. We're all elitists in one way or another (Show of hands: Who wants an elite surgeon to perform their heart-lung transplant and who wants a really average surgeon to do it? If you answer that you want the surgeon from the really meaty part of the bell curve, I will concede you are no elitist).What's offensive about Obama's comment isn't its elitism per se, but the arrogance of assuming that those who see the world through a different prism or who are relatively immune to his charms are somehow embittered and confused and therefore less equipped to decide who should be our elected elite.
I don't think that I've complained about "elitism" in my numerous posts on Obama (though I could be wrong), because I agree. There's nothing intrinsically wrong with being elite, and being elite is something to which we should in fact aspire, though it should be a goal reached through hard work, and not simply the luck of birth (other than perhaps genetically endowed talent).
"Elitism" is one of those words, like "judgmental" and "discriminating," that have gotten an unfairly bad wrap. During the Wright imbroglio, one of my anonymous Obamamaniacal commenters amusingly (and idiotically) told me to stop being so judgmental, as though there's something wrong with having, and exercising, judgment. And what is selecting a better job candidate over a worse one, if not "discrimination"? There is nothing wrong with judging or discriminating. What becomes a problem is when the judging and discriminating occur on an irrational basis (e.g., skin color alone--though even there there could sometimes be a reasonable basis).
As an example, I was recently discussing the possibility of doing some consulting for a firm to help with some regulatory issues in the UK. The person I was speaking with thought that I (and my business associates) had excellent credentials for the task, except for one problem--we (due, no doubt to a misspent youth spent largely in the US) had American accents. He didn't think that we could be as effective with Whitehall and Parliament as someone who spoke like most in The City, and we couldn't disagree with him. This was discrimination, but it was hardly unreasonable. He was, in fact, exercising good judgment, and perhaps even being justifiably elitist, in that he wanted the best people for the job.
In any event, I tend to discriminate against people who view the world through a Marxist lens, and can be very judgmental about them, particularly when they are vying for the most powerful position in the world. So sue me.
[Evening update]
Obama keeps digging deeper:
What happened to the people clinging to their guns?Were they "mangled" by insertion? Or have they now been mangled out of existence, now to be discarded? Why is there not a word about them?
(Sorry, but "hunting" is not the same. Don't call me a "hunter," because I don't hunt.)
Has the Second Amendment become a secondary wedge issue now that Obama has thought it over? Or has gun-clinging behavior been subsumed into anti-gay, and anti-immigrant "sentiments" which people don't really feel honestly, but only imagine they do because of exploitative prodding by their leaders?
The disturbing implication, of course, is that under the right, uh, leadership, uh, the negative thinking (all that gun-clinging, and all that bigotry) will be made to disappear.
I'm feeling plenty marginalized by this. It's bad enough to be told that as a gun owner I don't really think what I think, but I have been led into it by others.
But now I'm told that my guns are not the issue because they might as well be bigoted sentiments against gays and immigrants! But that if I harbor these sentiments (which I don't), they are no more mine than my gun-clinging behavior was.
I think that this is more evidence that he does a lot better with a teleprompter than impromptu. It also continues to be a window into what he really thinks about us.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Heh. I like this comment:
Obama's antics remind me of Barry Goldwater's comments about Richard Nixon during Watergate.Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:06 AM
"Well, first he shot himself in the foot, and then he shot himself in the other foot, and then he shot himself in the ass."Given Obama's great propensity to shoot himself in various places, I can understand why he might not like guns.
Well, at least in Italy:
The big news is that the Communists are gone, for the first time since the end of the Second World War. Really gone. They didn't win a single seat in either chamber. A lot of famous faces will vanish from Parliament, and it is even possible, although unlikely, that some of the comrades will be forced to join the working class. The Greens are also gone. In fact, there are only six parties in the new Parliament, suggesting that Italy's well on the road to a two-party political system instead of the dreadful proportional electoral model that has destroyed virtually every country where it's been applied. If that happens, a lot of the credit goes to Veltroni, who created a real center-left party and refused to admit the old Left.
Not just big news, but great news, worthy of a celebration. I look forward to the day when one will find them only in museums of bad ideas of the last millennium, and college campuses. Unfortunately, they never really disappear. The toxic ideas will just resurface under another name (as has in fact happened in the guise of environmentalism, though the demise of the Italian Green Party is encouraging as well in that regard).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:14 AMHey, I'm all in favor of factory-manufactured meat, if it can be made to taste as good as the naturally grown variety, but I'm not going to stop eating meat until it happens. My criteria are basically intelligence based, and the first animal I'd give up eating, if I were going to give up any,s would be pigs, but I still occasionally have pork. I don't feel that badly about eating cattle--they just don't seem that bright to me. And the question of whether or not they're better off living a short life, and then being slaughtered, than never having existed at all is one that, as noted, is purely subjective and unresolvable in any ultimate sense. I know that I've seen some pretty happy looking cows on the hillsides overlooking the Pacific in northern California. I can think of worse lives.
By the way, Phil should be aware that marsupials are mammals. The distinction is placental versus non-placental mammals. And there are people (probably some of those "bitter," out-of-work folks) in this country who eat possum, and armadillo.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AMFrom Lileks:
It's possible there are bitter people who regard their station in life as a direct result of the current rate of capital gains taxes, but it seems an insufficiently reasoned basis for a national economic policy. Oh, it's possible; at this very minute one of the country's innumerable domestic terror cells could be planning a bombing of a Planned Parenthood center, driven to extremism by the very possibility of a Colombian trade pact. But I doubt it.
Not to say economics don't affect people; I'm not that stupid. But like any adversity, you meet it with a certain amount of psychological capital. The more grounded you are in things that transcend the dollar, the better you can deal with the downturns. Some seem to suspect that the "grounding" is nothing more than a stake in the ground to channel the bolts tossed off by madmen in the pulpits, but those are the people most likely to believe that church services either consist of yelling and snake-handling, or gaseous bromides pumped out over a complacent stack of prim-faced morons and hypocrites who spend the service lusting after young women in the choir. There is no goodness, only the momentary self-delusion accorded by participation in a consensual charade.I've been trying to find the right words for a certain theory, and I can't quite do it yet. It has to do with how a candidate feels about America - they have to be fundamentally, dispositionally comfortable with it. Not in a way that glosses over or excuses its flaws, but comfortable in the way a long-term married couple is comfortable. That includes not delighting in its flaws, or crowing them at every opportunity as proof of your love. I mean a simple quiet sense of awe and pride, its challenges and flaws and uniqueness and tragedies considered. You don't win the office by being angry we're not something else; you win by being enthused we can be something better. You can fake the latter. But people sense the former.
Yup. And a lot of them are the people--the so-called independents and "moderate" Republicans"--whom the Obamamaniacs were hoping that they could con this fall.
[Update a few minutes later]
Mickey has some more thoughts:
Making excuses for autonomous human actors is always a form of condescension, I'd say. But when you make excuses for arguably what many people regard as normal, even laudable behavior, you double down on the disrespect, because you are also challenging your subjects' moral framework.
He also has some commentary on Microsoft's brilliant marketing strategy:
It seems like a can't-lose approach for the Redmond, Wash. firm, as long as a) they continue to cultivate the image of a big, clumsy and greedy organization that's just stupid enough to kill a product consumers like in order to try to force them to purchase a product the corporate bureaucracy has ploddingly disgorged and b) their new products continue to be awful.
There hasn't been a breakthrough business plan like this since New Coke. "Suicide marketing." (Buy this before we do something rash!) ...P.S.: The only fly in the ointment is the slim possibility that Microsoft's next operating system, due in 2010, will actually be an improvement over Windows XP. But Ballmer & Co. know better than to let that happen.
[Early afternoon update]
John Judis says that "liberal" commentators are whistling past the fall graveyard if they don't think that Obama's faux pas (i.e., saying what he really thinks of the rubes) won't hurt him in the general election.
And Rick Lowry thinks (as I do) that the donkeys, continuing to be out of touch in their liberal cocoon with the aid of the MSM, are setting themselves up for another electoral disaster:
Obama prides himself on his civility, but it has to go much deeper than dulcet rhetoric. A fundamental courtesy of political debate is to meet the other side on its own terms. If someone says he cares about gun rights, it's rude to insist: "No, you don't. It's the minimum wage that you really care about, and you'd know it if you were more self-aware." But Democrats have an uncontrollable reflex to do just that. Since the McGovernite takeover of their party, they have struggled to work up enthusiasm for Middle American mores. (Since 1980, only Bill Clinton managed it, which is why he was the only Democrat elected president in three decades.)
When the liberal reflex is coupled with a Ivy League-educated candidate who seems personally remote and uncomfortable with everyday American activities, it's electoral poison. After the likes of Al Gore and John Kerry, Republicans had to be wondering, "Could Democrats possibly nominate yet another candidate easily portrayed as an out-of-touch elitist?" With Obama, Democrats appear to be responding with a resounding "Yes, we can!"
And yes, they will, unless Hillary! can stop them. Not that she has a much better chance of winning, since the blacks and the young people who are energizing the Obama campaign are likely to stay home if it is taken from him.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:29 AMJohn Wheeler has died:
Unlike some colleagues who regretted their roles after bombs were dropped on Japan, Wheeler regretted that the bomb had not been made ready in time to hasten the end of the war in Europe. His brother, Joe, had been killed in combat in Italy in 1944.
Wheeler later helped Edward Teller develop the even more powerful hydrogen bomb.The name "black hole" -- for a collapsed star so dense that even light could not escape -- came out of a conference in 1967. Wheeler made the name stick after someone else had suggested it as a replacement for the cumbersome "gravitationally completely collapsed star," he recalled.
"After you get around to saying that about 10 times, you look desperately for something better," he told the Times.
He was a giant in physics, and inspired a lot of great science fiction. RIP.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 12:09 PMI've only flown into three of these, but as I was reading, I wondered if they would mention Saba. Sure enough, it's number ten. I don't recall either JFK or St. Maarten being that scary, from a passenger perspective, but we flew into there on our way to Saba, which is quite an experience. As noted, it is a very short runway, with a dropoff over a cliff into the ocean if you don't stop on time. They fly very short takeoff/land planes in there. We flew in with a naval aviator and his wife who were stationed at Rosie Roads in Puerto Rico, and he said that it would be good training for a carrier landing, except that it was a lot more stable.
Anyway, it was worth it. A very quaint little Dutch tropical island, with a couple nice hiking trails around and up the mountain, with great views of Anguilla, St. Maarten/St. Martin, Nevis and other northern windward islands. And a marine preserve, for great diving.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:08 AMAlan Boyle has more info on this morning's press announcement from the Rocket Racing League. It looks like they haven't necessarily dropped XCOR as a supplier (as I previously speculated--note that there is a comment in that post, ostensibly from someone from the RRL, saying it was good news for everyone), but are looking for more competition for propulsion, so now they'll have a kerosene engine from XCOR and an alcohol engine from Armadillo. If they can spread the wealth and expand the industrial base for these technologies, that's all to the good.
And this should gladden the hearts of LLC competitors:
Carmack recently said he would make rocket engines available to customers at a cost of $500,000 apiece. He declined to say exactly how much the racing league was paying Armadillo for the current project - but he said the project had a higher priority than Armadillo's renewed push to win the NASA-funded Lunar Lander Challenge.
That could conceivably mean that they won't even bother, and will leave the money on the table for someone else, but even if they compete this year, their chances of winning will be reduced if they're not focused on it, so it could represent an opportunity for Masten, Unreasonable Rocket, and others.
Anyway, I'm glad to see this industry finally (literally) getting off the ground. I wrote a paper at STAIF ten years ago that we needed a racing industry to push the technology, just as occurred in the auto (and air) racing business. A lot of people at the session in which I presented it were skeptical at the time, but it looks like my vision is finally coming to fruition.
[Mid-morning update]
Here's another pre-press-conference report from the New York Times.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Clark Lindsey live blogged the press conference via call-in. I don't see any mention of XCOR.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:18 AMUnlike the Chinese slow-motion space program, if the Russians are serious about this, it would put them well ahead of us in spacefaring capability, and in a much better position to do missions not just to the moon, but out into the solar system.
According to Perminova, Roskosmos proposed the establishment of a manned assembly complex in Earth orbit. The government Security Council on April 11, supported the idea. The complex can be built ships too heavy to take off from the ground.
What a concept.
But we won't have to worry about NASA getting involved in such a race as long as Mike Griffin and the giant-rocket fetishists are in charge.
[Update about 9:30 AM EDT]
This isn't directly related, but what are the Russians talking about here?
Perminov said Friday that Russia may stop selling seats on its spacecraft to "tourists" starting in 2010 because of the planned expansion of the international space station's crew.
He said the station's permanent crew is expected to grow from the current three to six or even nine in 2010. That will mean that Russia will have fewer extra seats available for tourists on its Soyuz spacecraft, which are used to ferry crews to the station and back to Earth.
This is the first I've heard of such an "expectation." While I have no doubt that a fully-constructed station could support that level of crew, what do they do about lifeboats? My understanding has always been that the limiting factor on how many crew the station can handle at once is a function of the ability to return them to earth in an emergency. I've never agreed with that philosophy, and always thought that a backup coorbiting facility was a much better solution than evacuating the entire crew back to earth, but what I thought has never mattered. Are they proposing to leave crew without a way home, or adding docking modules for additional Soyuz (you'd need three to evacuate nine)? It has to be one or the other, at least until we get Dragon, or Orion or other alternatives flying, and certainly the latter is unlikely by 2010.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:52 AMFrom Kaus, who (smart guy that he is) agrees with me:
It lumps together things Obama wants us to think he thinks are good (religion) with things he undoubtedly thinks are bad (racism, anti-immigrant sentiment). I suppose it's logically possible to say 'these Pennsylvania voters are so bitter and frustrated that they cling to both good things and bad things,." but the implication is that these are all things he thinks are unfortunate and need explaining (because, his context suggests, they prevent voters from doing the right thing and voting for ... him). Yesterday at the CNN "Compassion Forum" Obama said he wasn't disparaging religion because he meant people "cling" to it in a good way! Would that be the same way they "cling" to "antipathy to people who aren't like them"--the very next phrase Obama uttered? Is racism one of those "traditions that are passed on from generation to generation" that "sustains us"? Obama's unfortunate parallelism makes it hard for him to extricate him from the charge that he was dissing rural Pennsylvanians' excess religiosity.
Exactly.
And on his intellectual arrogance:
And Obama never describes his own views as the products of anything except an accurate perception of reality. Come to think of it, has he ever expressed any doubt about--let alone apologized for--his views? He certainly didn't apologize in his "race" speech. He presents himself as near ominscient, the Archimedian point from which everyone else's beliefs and behavior can be assessed and explained, and to which almost everyone's beliefs will revert after the revolution. ... sorry, I mean after President Obama has restored hope!
Of course, as someone else noted the other day, when one considers that Obama's most direct experience with Christianity is sitting in the pew of Trinity United for two decades, it shouldn't be surprising that he thinks that all religious people are bitter, bigoted and xenophobic.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Obama's spinmeisters are trying to avoid the real issue:
While the description of small town Pennsylvanians as "bitter" is certainly impolitic, many political analysts say it's what follows that adjective that is potentially so alienating -- the notion that small town folks "get bitter" after which "they cling to guns or religion, or antipathy to people who aren't like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment, or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
But Obama allies are trying to focus on the "bitter" part alone.A robo-call on behalf of the Obama campaign from Mayor John Brenner of York, Pa., says that, "Barack Obama understands us. He's got it right, we are frustrated -- frustrated with polices that enable businesses to leave our community, pensions to be stripped, health care benefits to be taken away and homes foreclosed. Unlike his opponents, who have been part of the Washington establishment that are out of touch with us, Barack Obama will change Washington. It is policies that hurt us. He will take on the special interests and fight for us."
We'll see if the MSM let him get away with it. So far, at least Jake Tapper isn't.
[Update a few minutes later]
Donald Sensing says that Obama needs to learn when to quit digging:
So family, community and religious faith are apparently what angry, bitter people embrace. Well, I'm not bitter about anything (except, perhaps, the exceptionally poor candidates all around for the presidency this year), and I turn to all those things.
So, does Obama mean that happy, contented people have little truck with family, community or faith? I can't believe he thinks that even if he did imply it. (Others have commented that Obama's speaking strength is from prepared texts and he stumbles frequently off the cuff. I dunno). But if he does think that, it's just stunning in its error and stupidity. But again, I don't think he meant to imply it, though he did, and I don't think he believes it.But that doesn't let him off the hook because if he thinks that happy, contented people embrace family-community-religion as quickly as angry, bitter people, exactly what has he said here? Nothing. Really, think about. Nothing. Except that bitter people like to own guns - I truly think that Obama can't fathom why a happy, contented person would want to do that.
I'm starting to think that what Obama can't fathom would fill a large library.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:32 AMThe Piccadilly was knocked down for the Marriott Marquis, which is really one hell of a hotel. I stayed there for a week; loved the rooms and the hotel and the location, but I absolutely hated the glass elevators. Practically had to huff a bag of laughing gas to get on the things.
It's a problem with Marriotts in general. The large atrium with the glass 'vators seems to be a trademark. I hate them. They don't seem to take into account the acrophobes among us.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:27 AMI put this in a previous post on Obama and his fascist (not that there's anything wrong with that) antipathy to individualism, but decided that it deserved one of its own:
O Bama, who art on the campaign trail,
Hallowed be thy name;
Thy election come;
Thy will be done,
In the US as it is in Europe.
Give us this day our daily entitlements.
And forgive us our political incorrectness,
As we forgive those bible-thumping gun-toting hicks
That trespass against us.
And lead us not into capitalism;
But deliver us from patriotism.
For thine is the STATE,
The power, and the glory,
For ever and ever (and ever).
[Via a commenter at Rantburg]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:57 PMIf you type in "HALP US BRAK WE R STUK IN SMALL TOWN," it will respond: "Did you mean: HALP US BREAK WE R STUCK IN SMALL TOWN?"
Posted by Rand Simberg at 03:34 PMOK, Friday night's post was getting way too long with all the updates, but Obama's latest faux pas (i.e., letting slip how he really feels about the rubes) is the gift that just keeps giving. Ace has a plea for help from the hinterlands ("Halp Us Brak, We Are Stuk In Small Town"), and a link to the latest non-apology apology: "I'm sorry you're too stupid to understand what I meant."
And Iowahawk has managed to milk it for another golden oldie: "The Heart of Redness."
I should note that much of the media and the Democrats remain clueless as to why this was so offensive. First of all, few people, even bitter people, like being told that they're "bitter," though of course there are exceptions (no surprise that it's a Democrat). They especially don't like it when they don't feel bitter at all, as is the case for most people, even most Reagan Democrats (which comprise many of the people who he was insulting). Of course, even if Keystone State Democrats are bitter, that's not going to help him in the fall with the vast majority of Pennsylvanians who are not.
But beyond that, as I mentioned in comments yesterday:
He conflated being anti-trade, pro-gun, religious, and bigoted. Now that implies that these things are all similar in some way. They are either good traits, or bad traits, but the implication (and what it is clear that Obama, and much of the Democrat elite believe, based not just on this one foot-in-mouth incident, but many over the years) is that these are bad things. Now I happen to believe that bigotry and opposition to trade are wrong, but I don't think that there's anything wrong with gun ownership (and use) or being religious.
But now we know what the Democrats think of ordinary people in this country. The notion that these double-plus ungood thoughts are caused by economic deprivation are entirely beside the point. It was the bigotry of the elitist Democrats on display, and it wasn't pretty. Now as it happens, Hillary believes this, too, but at least she's savvy enough to lie about it, so she'll be able to take big-time advantage of it.
Commenter "Bob"'s amusing response to this was:
Obama never said or even implied that being anti-trade, pro-gun, religious, and/or being bigoted is bad (although of course everyone says that being bigoted is bad). He was saying that what those four traits have in common is that the Republicans have a lock on them! Now, lets pause, because saying that Republicans or their party has a lock on bigotry is controversial and argumentative (and untrue, in my opinion), but he was speaking to a partisan crowd.
In any case, Rand, I believe you misunderstood. Obama was making an argument for why people vote Republican. He was talking about the Democrat-Republican axis, not the Good-Bad axis.
Well, this might be salient if so many Democrats didn't equate "Republican" with "bad." But there's a lot of truth to the old cliche, Republicans think that Democrats are foolish, and Democrats think that Republicans are evil. If "Bob" doesn't think that there aren't many elitist Democrats (and you can bet that that room to which Obama was speaking last Friday was chock full of them) who think that guns and gun owners are bad, and that religiosity (at least "right-wing conservative" religiosity) is "bad" (and "Republican") then he must not get out much, and hasn't been listening to very many speeches by them.
In fact, Iowahawk hilariously captured this kind of bewilderment with homo red-status and condescension in a spoof on a speech by Howard Dean a year and a half ago. Believe me, satire like this doesn't work without an underlying truth. And it works brilliantly.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Barack Obama, you're no Ronald Reagan.
I'm most of the way through Jonah's book
But as JPod points out, it is the Obamites who are creating the personality cult, and it is Michelle Obama who is making demands of the citizens, something that Reagan never did, and would never have done.
[Update a couple minutes]
Here's a comment from JPod's post that I think is quite insightful:
Obama said that bitter middle Americans cling to guns or religion. What that actually means is that most Americans erroneously rely on themselves or their God to provide and protect them and not the collective state. And they do so not out of bitterness, but from a foundational belief that "We the People" form a more perfect union, not "We the State" form a more perfect people.
It's not middle America that's bitter but Obama. And since he clings to the power of the state to provide and protect him and wants middle America to do so as well. That's the cynicism that Barak and Michelle Obama wants us to shed, our cynicism of the state as our protector and provider. And that's why Michelle Obama is, for the first time in a long time, proud of America, because she stands at threshold of not only scolding Obama for not putting his socks in the hamper and the butter in the cupboard, but the rest of America as well.
Indeed.
[OK, (at least) one more]
Over at Reason, Michael Young nails it:
Obama's approach betrays a very suffocating vision of the state as the be-all and end-all of political-cultural behavior. Outside the confines of the state there is no salvation, only resentment. This is nonsense, but it also partly explains why Obama is so admired among educated liberals, who still view the state as the main medium of American providence.
For those who haven't read Jonah's book
[Yet another update]
Obviously, satire aside, I find this an important topic. Donald Sensing gets right to the nub of it as well, and why I could never vote for Barack Obama:
Let's look at Obama's laundry list of Pennsylvanians' dysfunctions again:
- bitterness
- "Clinging to"
- guns
- religion
- racism
- chauvinism
- anti-trade sentiment
Reading the full context of Obama's remarks, it strikes me that he believes that all of these (presumed) symptoms spring from the fact that there is too little control of the economy by the federal government. Obama said that all of these dysfunctions began when the government let their jobs go away and then, through both Republican and Democrat administrations, did nothing to "regenerate" them.
It is the lack of regulation of the economy, Obama believes, that makes people bitter, racist, religious, hunters, patriotic or protectionist. All these things are bad, and they all result from free-market, democratic capitalism. I know that many of you reading this will think I'm over-reaching here, but I stand my ground: Obama's remarks are in fact as clear a declaration of cleaving to socialism as almost anything he could have said.
...what I find especially disturbing in Obama's remarks, that I have not seen in Mrs. Clinton's ever, is the ideal of the "perfectibility of man." This is the hoariest socialist doctrine of all, explicit in Marxism and later, Marxism-Leninism. This is an idea so utterly vacuous and foolish that not even the Euro socialist governments cleave to it, if they ever did, except in Eastern Europe, and then only when they were communist. Clearly implicit on Obama's remarks is the idea that since racism, religion et. al., arise from the lack of government regulation, they can be expunged by more of it.
You see, we can all become virtuous if only the government controlled our lives.
Not only are Obama's remarks a clarion call to socialism, they also objectify the people he refers to. He dismissed them as free, moral agents in their own right. Gosh, it's no wonder those white people hate blacks and Hispanics, go to church and buy guns and feel angry - they can't help it. The government has let them down. But with proper government regulation, intervention, activism (oh, just pick your own name), then they won't be racists, religious, xenophobic, or own guns.
Emphasis mine. "Perfectibility of man" isn't just a Marxist concept: it's a fascist one as well.
[Early evening update]
The Obama prayer:
O Bama, who art on the campaign trail,
hallowed be thy name;
thy election come;
thy will be done,
in the US as it is in Europe.
Give us this day our daily entitlements.
And forgive us our political incorrectness,
as we forgive those bible-thumping gun-toting hicks
that trespass against us.
And lead us not into capitalism;
but deliver us from patriotism.
For thine is the STATE,
the power, and the glory,
For ever and ever (and ever).
Amen.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:59 AMThomas James, on the difficulty of writing post-apocalyptic survival stories about people with no interest in survival.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:34 AMWell, he still doesn't have one, but there's nothing particularly objectionable about these comments, as far as they go:
Q: What do you plan to do with the space agency? Like right now they're currently underfunded, they, at first they didn't know if they were going to be able to operate Spirit rover. What do plan to do with it?
Obama: I think that, I, uh. I grew up with the space program. Most of you young people here were born during the shuttle era. I was the Apollo era. I remember, you know, watching, you know, the moon landing. I was living in Hawaii when I was growing up, so the astronauts would actually, you know, land in the Pacific and then get brought into Honolulu and it was incredible memories and incredibly inspiring. And by the way inspired a whole generation of people to get engaged in math and science in a way that we haven't - that we need to renew. So I'm a big supporter of the space program. I think it needs to be redefined, though.We've kind of lost a sense of mission in terms of what it is that NASA should be trying to achieve and I think that we've gotta make some big decisions about whether or not, are we going to try to send manned, you know, space launches, or are we better off in terms of what we're learning sending unmanned probes which oftentimes are cheaper and less dangerous, but yield more information.
And that's a major debate I'm going to want to convene when I'm president of the United States. What direction do we take the space program in? Once we have a sense of what's going to be most valuable for us in terms of gaining knowledge, then I think we'll able to adjust the budget so that we're going all out on what it is that we've decided to do."
I've long said that we need to have a national debate on what we want to do in space, and why--something that hasn't really happened since NASA was chartered, half a century ago, so I would certainly welcome such a debate in the unfortunate event of an Obama presidency.
My question is, though: why wait? Why not have the debate now, so we can decide who we want to vote for, at least for those of us for whom space is a voting issue (if not the only consideration). What would be the venue and framework for the debate? What does Senator Obama think that the potential options are? Will he be constrained by past thinking, of space as the province of NASA and astronauts, with billions of dollars flowing in its porcine manner to Houston, Huntsville and the Cape, or will he be open to both goals and means that are more innovative than we've seen from any previous administration, including the Bush administration? Will he be a candidate for "hope" and "change" for the high frontier?
Well, like all his other positions, he does offer "hope" and "change" for space with the above words, but not clue one as to what we should be hoping for, and what form the "change" will take. In other words, as on other issues, he continues to deal in platitudes, and is unwilling to take a stand, or even discuss potential options, for fear of alienating the voters, who he hopes will continue to view him as a political Rorschach test, and see in his space policy, as in all his policies, what they want to see.
So while I hope that if elected, we will have that national dialogue about space, I don't have any high expectations either that it will actually happen, or that anything useful will come out of it, because he offers me no substance now.
Of course, even if he told me that he's going to do all of the things that I'd like to see from a space policy standpoint, it wouldn't be sufficient to get me to vote for him because a) I couldn't be sure that he meant it, given his flip flopping on other issues, 2) his positions on other issues are too odious to allow me to be a single-issue voter on space and 3) even if sincere, there's no reason, given his complete lack of executive experience, that he will have any success whatsoever in implementing them.
Still, I'd sure like to see that national debate.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:14 AMIt's kind of late now if you didn't make plans, and I gave advance notice a few days ago, but tonight is Yuri's Night, as we are reminded by Phil Bowermaster.
And in response to a previous commenter that we shouldn't be celebrating a Soviet victory in the Cold War, we should be long past that. We won, and in fact, if Gagarin hadn't flown, we might not have gone to the moon. Of course, it's debatable whether or not that was a good thing for our expansion into space, in light of the history since.
In any event, it's an historical event, to celebrate the first time a human left the planet and went into space far enough to actually orbit, and almost half a century later, it transcends politics and a dead communist (and fascist) empire.
We aren't attending a party, both because we're not much on partying, if it means loud atrocious dance music, but also because the nearest (and only) one that anyone could muster up in Florida was up in Cocoa Beach. That nothing was organized in the metropolitan tri-counties of Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade says something about the importance of space in our culture, but I'm not quite sure what.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 04:01 PMBarack Obama showed his deft political touch today, and demonstrated his keen insight into the lives of the little people in this country, with a speech that is sure to be worth at least thirty points in Pennsylvania in the upcoming primary:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
I asked around the area, to see how his obvious compassion for Pennsylvanians was viewed. This is just one story, from one man in West Deer Township, but I'm sure that it's typical.
"By cracky, it's like the man sees into my very soul!
"Thirty years ago, I had a good job in the mill in Pittsburgh. I was bringing in a good income, going to jazz clubs, discussing Proust over white wine and brie, with my gay friends of all colors. I was all for free trade, so that we could sell the steel overseas, and I never bothered to go to church, let alone actually believe in God.
"But then, the plant closed down, and I couldn't get another job. I went on unemployment, and found odd jobs here and there, but they barely paid the rent on the loft, and the payment on the Bimmer. I couldn't afford the wine and brie any more, and had to shift over to beer and brats.
"Of course, as a result, I started hanging out with the wrong crowd--the beer drinkers.
"And it wasn't just the beer. Some of them actually went out in the woods in the fall, and shot animals. And kilt 'em. With real guns!
"I was shocked, of course. For all their diversity, none of my gay friends would have ever thought of doing anything like that. But with my job loss, and lack of money for pedicures and pommade, they didn't want to hang with me any more. So I borried a twelve gauge over'n'under, and went out with my new beer-drinking animal-killing friends in the woods. And I'll tell you what, when I shot down that eight-pointer, I felt a sense of power over the helpless in a way that I hadn't since I'd been looking down on the rednecks when I had that good job in Pittsburgh, driving around town in my 528i.
"But somehow the killing, and hating those two-timing nancy boys wasn't enough. I was still in despair. I started to search for answers, and I thought that I found them in Jesus. It started small, just church on Sunday, with prayers and a lecture from the preacher.
"But it didn't stop there. Soon I was attending Wednesday night revivals, and huzzahing and hossanahing, and babbling with the best of them. After a few months I'd graduated to juggling garter snakes, then rattlers.
"But it wasn't enough. Despite all the gun caressing, and animal killing, and hatred of people who weren't like me, and anger at the Colombians who were...doing something to me--I'm not entirely sure what, and the tongue speaking and snake handling, I still couldn't find a job.
"My social life continued to deteriorate. Not only was I no longer interested in those sensitive swishes, or literature, but I was starting to look with lust at my sister. And not just look, I'll tell you what. She'd been out of work, too, and was getting mighty interested, if you know what I mean.
"I have hit rock bottom.
"Please, help me, O Bama. Forgive me, O Bama. O Bama, my Bama, rescue me from this living hell in which Reagan, and Bush, and Clinton, and Bush, have consigned me. Restore unto me my loft and my teutonic status symbol. Give me back my poofter friends, and my pinot grigio and my baked gruyere, and lattes. Save me from the killing and the beer, and most of all, from Jesus. Save me, O my Bama, and I will commit my vote unto you.
This is just one story of the many lives that Barack Obama has touched, and blessed, this day in the benighted Keystone State. But with his obvious compassion, and ability to feel the pain of others so unlike him, he is sure to carry the state in a couple weeks.
[Late evening update]
Ace has more:
Obama To Rural Pennsylvanians: Vote For Me, You Corncob-Smokin', Banjo-Strokin' Chicken-Chokin' Cousin-Pokin' Inbred Hillbilly Racist Morons
Yeah, that's about it.
[Saturday morning update]
More from Mickey Kaus:
Excuse me? Hunting is part of working-class American culture. Does Obama really think that working-class whites in Pennsylvania were gun control liberals until their industries were downsized, whereas they all rushed to join the NRA ...
I used to think working class voters had conservative values because they were bitter about their economic circumstances--welfare and immigrants were "scapegoats," part of the false consciousness that would disappear when everyone was guaranteed a good job at good wages. Then I left college. ......Rather than trying to spin his way out, wouldn't it be better for Obama to forthrightly admit his identity? Let's have a national dialogue about egghead condescension!
[Mid-Saturday morning update]
This is turning out to be the Blazing Saddles election:
It's amazing how many lines from that movie work for this campaign.The first question Obama got in Iowa
What's a dazzling urbanite like you doing in a rustic setting like this?
Explaining the Iowa caucus to newcomers
Now, I suppose you're all wondering just what in the heck you're doing out here in the middle of a prairie in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night.
Crowd: You bet your ass.Despite setbacks, Mike Gravel stays in the race
no sidewindin bushwackin, hornswaglin, cracker croaker is gonna rouin me bishen cutter.
Obama's campaign theme
He conquered fear and he conquered hate He turned dark night into day.
Hillary rounds up her operatives
I want rustlers, cut throats, murderers, bounty hunters, desperados, mugs, pugs, thugs, nitwits, halfwits, dimwits, vipers, snipers, con men, Indian agents, Mexican bandits, muggers, buggerers, bushwhackers, hornswogglers, horse thieves, bull dykes, train robbers, bank robbers, ass-kickers, shit-kickers and Methodists.
Ezra Klein hears a speech
God darnit...you use your tongue prettier than a twenty dollar whore.
Obama after every press appearance
Ooh, baby, you are so talented! And they are so DUMB!
Obama explaining his post-racial appeal
Well, to tell the family secret, my grandmother was Dutch.
But Hispanics are skeptical of Obama and his supporters
Hast du gesehen in deine Leben? They're darker than us!
The party's new reaction to Hillary
Shut up, you Teutonic tw@t!
The anguish of the superdelegates
We've gotta protect our phoney baloney jobs, gentlemen!
and of course for the current situation
You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Oooh, oooohhh, there's more! I found Obama's Facebook page. Note that one of his favorite books is one about an obsessive hatred of a white whale.
So, is a cigar just a cigar? I report, you decide.
[Update a few minutes later]
One more (more serious) thought. When Obama talks about "clinging to religion," is he saying that his religious belief is founded in something other than economic hardship? Or is he implying that, despite his words and church attendance for the past twenty years, that he's at heart an agnostic, if not an atheist? Was the church thing all for political show (as it was with at least Bill, if not both Clintons)? And of course, if these are his true feelings (and I suspect that one is more likely to hear what he really thinks when he perceives himself to be among a friendly audience), then it's not surprising that he could sit through twenty years of Pastor Wright bigotry and hatred and find nothing exceptional or objectionable about it. He's smart enough to know that others will find it so, so he pretends to be outraged when called on it, but he wasn't smart enough to see how his remarks in this case would be viewed by those to whom he unconsciously condescends.
I think that this could be a campaign killer in the fall. That sound bite will be shown over and over again. I just regret that it came out this soon. Unfortunately, the Democrats still have a chance to eject him before he gets the nomination. But even if they do, it will still be an electoral disaster for them. The problem is that it isn't just Obama. Most of them are just smart enough not to voice their bigotry publicly, but this is how much of the party itself views rural and middle America, and it's going to hurt them all through the fall. And justly so.
[Late morning update]
Mark Steyn has further thoughts:
I had a ton of fun covering Kerry's awkwardness with Americans but, in fairness, it was essentially a consumerist snobbery: he preferred the Newburgh Yacht Club for lunch over the local Wendy's, he'd rather be windsurfing off Nantucket than rednecking at Nascar, etc. Obama's snobbery seems more culturally profound, and unlike Kerry he can't plead the crippling disadvantage of a privileged childhood. Rather, Barack's condescension reveals a man out of touch with the rhythms of American life to a degree that's hard to fathom. As Michelle says, they "chose" to "leave corporate America", and Barack became a "community organizer" and she wound up a 350-grand-a-year "diversity outreach coordinator". I've no idea what either of those careers involve, and most of us seem able to get along without them. But their remoteness from the American mainstream perhaps explains why the Obamas seem to have no clue how Americans live their lives.
And yes, I'm a foreigner. But it takes one to know one, and this guy seems weirdly disconnected from everything except neo-segregationist Afrocentric grievance politics and upscale white liberal condescension. Not much of a coalition.
But that's the modern Democrat Party. Without the media (which is as elitist as they are) in their pocket, they'd never stand a chance.
[Early afternoon update]
Was Obama's faux pas the sound of the horse beginning to clear its throat for its aria? This kind of thing is what keeps Hillary from dropping out.
[Another update a few minutes later]
And of course, Iowahawk has to pile on, with a golden oldie about rebellious youth:
Like most of their classmates, these North Shore Neckies were once bound for some of the top universities in America -- Yale, Duke, Stanford, Northwestern -- until they succumbed to the allure of the Downhome slacker lifestyle. Now some openly talk of dropping out, learning TIG welding, waiting tables at Waffle House or draining oil at Jiffy Lube; some even hint of enrolling at Iowa State. What drives privileged teens to such seemingly self-destructive behavior?
"I guess you might could say we're rebels," says Rachel 'Tyffanie' Stern, 17, lighting a Merit Menthol 100. Once destined for Vassar, Stern is now living with friends after her parents kicked her out of the house for spending her bat mitzvah money on a bass boat. Last month she became the youngest Jewish female to win an event on the Bassmasters Pro Tour.Pausing for furtive glances, several of the teens share sniffs from a bottle of Harmon Triple Heat deer scent.
"Wooo-eee, shit howdy, that's gonna bring a mess of them whitetail bucks," says 19-year old Wei-Li 'Lamar' Cheung. A former Westinghouse Science Award winner, Cheung has devoted his chemistry and biology skill to building a fledgling hunting supply business.
A first generation Asian-American, Cheung says he was drawn to the group by their acceptance of minorities. "Hell, I kept tellin' all my family and teachers I wanna play fiddle, not violin," he explains. "The 'Necks accept me the way I am."
African-American Kwame 'Joe Don' Harris agrees. "Just because I'm black, teachers were always pushing me to go to Spellman to study Langston Hughes and Thelonius Monk," says the 17 year old. "These ol' boys here never laugh at my dream to be a crew chief for the Craftsman Truck Series."
If there is one aspiration that unites them all, it is the dream of moving to Branson, Missouri. Long famed for its laid-back attitude toward religion, country music and the military, Branson has become a Mecca for radical young Neckies seeking an escape from the stultifying conformity of their coastal hometowns.
Only Barack can save us from this ongoing tragedy.
[Late afternoon update]
Obama is doing damage control with some of the yokelocals. I'm sure that Miss Hathaway will be able to smooth things over, except maybe with Grannie.
[Update on Sunday evening]
I've quit updating have some follow-up thoughts on Obama, and what this means about his attitudes toward individualism, here.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:06 PMObama's campaign isn't as grass roots as he'd like us to believe:
That picture differs substantially from the image offered by Obama of a campaign directed by grassroots activists. Their money clearly doesn't do the talking. Bundlers direct the campaign, quite literally, and those bundlers represent moneyed interests -- a much different reality than what Obama and his advocates admit.As someone who opposes most campaign-finance reform efforts as misguided and harmful to free speech, I don't find anything particularly objectionable to this structure. It fits within the legal parameters of campaigning, and it mirrors every other major campaign in American national elections. However, Barack Obama has argued for campaign finance reform and for public funding of presidential elections. His rejection of that money doesn't come from any high-minded sense of civic duty; it's a threadbare rationalization for succumbing to what he himself campaigns against -- the Beltway mentality.
In short, Obama's principles are up for sale. He may make a better pitch than most, but in the end he's just a higher-price sellout than most others. That's not hope or change, but simply hypocrisy on a bigger scale.
I'm sure that this is that new politics that we've been hearing so much about.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:38 AMOK, so I followed Pete's advice, and tried an upgrade from Core 7 to Core 8 via yum (yes, I know that Core 9 will be out shortly, but I figure it would probably be a mistake to go directly from 7 to 9, based on previous experience). Everything went fine until the end, when it failed with this message:
--> Processing Conflict: glibc-common conflicts glibc < 2.7
Error: No Package Matching glibc.i686
So, now what?
[Evening update]
OK, I ended up having to completely blow away glibc. Unsurprisingly, it broke my installation, with no obvious way to fix it. But it allowed me (finally) to do an ftp upgrade via a rescue CD. I'm now running FC8.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:05 AMYes, we can! But I hope we don't.
From the comments section at Frank J.'s place. Can we mock Obamamaniacs? Yes, we can!
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AMThomas James has a question that I've often wondered about as well:
I have to wonder, has every project I have ever worked on with LM (X-33, VentureStar, ET, CEV/Orion, among others) started from scratch with everything from numbering schemes to release processes to configuration management to data vaulting to drawing formats and standards to basic skill mix and team structures? You'd think that after so many decades that a lot of this stuff would have become routine by now -- revised periodically as new technology becomes available, of course, but not built anew every time.
A counter argument to this -- and one I used frequently when confronted with the All-Encompassing Michoud Excuse for Not Improving Processes: "That's the way ET does it" -- is that one ought to take advantage of the start of a new program to incorporate the lessons learned from other programs, thereby continuously improving the way business is done. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a middle ground between status quo and Year Zero when it comes to these things.
Every time we used to do a proposal at Rockwell/Boeing, and have to describe the systems engineering process, it seemed like we had to come with a new process flow description and graphic, as though we'd never done this before, instead of taking an existing one and tweaking it, and this applied all across the board--in risk mitigation and management, trade analyses, etc.
If I were running one of these multi-billion dollar corporations, I'd put someone in charge of boilerplate and legacy, so that there was a one-stop shop of best practices and material for use in both proposing and managing programs. Maybe they have one, and I was always unaware of it, but if that's the case, that's a big problem as well.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:55 AMApparently Aerojet is getting into the responsive reusable engine business (albeit with Air Force funding). I think that's great, but I have to wonder if the reporter has been paying attention to what has been going on in the industry:
The last US-designed and produced hydrocarbon engine was the Rocketdyne RS-27, based on 1960s technology and now out of production.
There may be some qualifying adjectives that would make that statement true (of thrust greater than X? Used in an orbital launch system?), but folks like XCOR and Armadillo, and Masten, and several contenders for the LLC would be surprised to learn that they haven't been designing and producing hydrocarbon engines for the past few years.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:15 AMThe Rocket Racing League is going to make a press announcement on Monday, but the release raises some questions:
Rocket Racing League Composites Corp. will announce the acquisition of a leading aircraft manufacturer and a partnership with a leading engine manufacturer...
...WHO:
Granger Whitelaw, CEO, Rocket Racing League
Peter Diamandis, Co-Founder, Rocket Racing League
Adam Smith, Vice President, EAA
Len Fox, Test Pilot, Rocket Racing Composites Corp.
Scott Baker, President, Velocity Aircraft
Neil Milburn, Armadillo Aerospace
John Carmack, Armadillo Aerospace
We have a missing player, and a new player. XCOR was building the initial racers, but they don't seem to be represented at the event. And this is the first time that I've heard Armadillo associated with the project. So apparently, for whatever reason, Armadillo is now providing propulsion for the racers, and they're apparently acquiring an aircraft manufacturer (Velocity?). I wonder why they have to acquire Velocity. Can't they just buy modified aircraft? Or maybe they're being imprecise in language, and it's also a partner?
This obviously raises many questions, none of which I know the answers to, but it would seem to be bad news (though of course by no means fatal) for XCOR. It certainly won't affect their work on the Lynx. It's also good news for Armadillo, and it means a new customer with apparent confidence in their hardware, even after the engine problems at the cup last October.
Perhaps the questions will be answered at the press conference, if asked.
[Update a few minutes later]
Actually, on reconsideration, it's not even obvious that it is bad news for XCOR (though clearly John Carmack must think that it's good for Armadillo, or he wouldn't have done the deal). It could be that, now that they're trying to focus on developing a true suborbital vehicle, the RRL work was proving to be a distraction for them that they've now gotten out from under. But it's speculation on my part, either way.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:07 PMATK is making noises about commercializing Ares 1. Unsurprisingly, it's full of bovine excrement right off the bat:
Ron Dittemore, president of ATK Launch Systems, said the human-rating that led NASA to build the Ares I first stage around the shuttle booster should also be attractive to other customers with "high-value" payloads, including the Defense Dept. and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO).
"Ares I can deliver humans, can deliver payload to low Earth orbit; it can deliver payload to geosynchronous Earth orbit and beyond - planetary missions - it's got that much capability," Dittemore said at the 24th National Space Symposium here. "And what's unique is that since we're designing this vehicle with human reliability, proven demonstrated systems, high-value payload customers may see a real attractiveness to putting either DOD or NRO payloads on this launch system."
First of all, the Shuttle booster is not "human rated." The Shuttle itself is not, and never has been, human-rated (I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I wish that we could expunge the phrase "human rating" from our vocabulary--very few phrases in the space business are as misunderstood and misused by so many as this one). What he means is that the fact that they have been willing to use the SRB for the Shuttle (despite the fact that in the case of Challenger, it destroyed the vehicle and killed the crew) led them to decide that it was reliable enough to use for Ares.
One of the things that people don't understand about "human rating" is that it is not (just) about reliability, which is the probability of mission success. Human rating is about safety, which is a different thing. It is about the ability to know when the mission is about to go sour, and the ability to safely get away from the vehicle before it does. So while reliability is nice, what's much more important is warning time and escapability, from the launch pad all the way to orbit (something that the Shuttle has never had, which is why it's not human rated).
But satellites aren't going to have a launch escape system, so they don't care about human rating. What they care about is reliability, and I have seen zero evidence that Ares is going to be more reliable than either Delta IV or Atlas V. Human rating the latter two vehicles will not involve making them more reliable--it will involve putting in the systems needed for adequate failure onset detection (FOSD) and ensuring that they have adequate performance to eliminate abort blackout zones throughout their trajectory (something much more difficult for the Delta than the Atlas, due to to its underpowered second stage). So from a mission assurance standpoint, Ares has nothing to offer to a satellite owner over the current commercial vehicles.
Moreover, there is no discussion of cost. Even if they can get away with not having to amortize development, because the government paid for it and it's sunk, how much of an army will a NASA-developed/operated vehicle require? History would indicate a pretty large one, particularly given the politics of the situation. So will a commercial launch have to pay its share of the annual fixed operating costs, or will ATK (unfairly) be able to subsidize and undercut the ULA by only paying marginal costs for the launch, and having NASA pay the freight for the rest? And it will have to use the VAB for processing, and the NASA pad for launch. Will NASA be reimbursed for the use of its facilities? How much?
This seems like a huge potential bucket of worms, and all because NASA decided that it had to develop its own launch vehicle.
Is ATK serious? I doubt it. I suspect that this is just a PR move to maintain political support for it among the rubes inside the Beltway who don't understand these issues, to show that it has applications beyond the NASA lunar (and ISS) missions. Unfortunately, it may work.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Oh, and how could I forget this? How thrilled will the satellite owners be to put their bird on the paint mixer that is the Ares 1, on top of that five-segment solid, when they can get a smooth ride on a Delta or Atlas?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:15 AM"...are like poultry supporting Colonel Sanders."
I think that he really has done us a favor with this new "dialogue" on race. He's shown how mainstream bigotry is within the black community. As the commenters point out, it's (finally, and justly) tearing the Democrat Party apart.
And Roger Simon has more thoughts on the "evil" that those Hollywood Jews have done to blacks:
Lee seems genuinely to espouse the belief that African-Americans should only reconcile with Jews if Jews apologize for the supposed evil stereotypes they created of blacks via, I assume, the movies. I wonder if Lee means that Jew Stanley Kramer who made Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and The Defiant Ones. Or that Jew Ed Zwick who directed Glory? Maybe he's talking about me for scripting Richard Pryor's Bustin' Loose? It's not the greatest film in the world (though it did win an Image Award that year from the NAACP), but if I was trucking in black stereotypes, I'd like to know. Richard might have too, if he were with us. Or what Jew does Lee really mean? I'd like to see him name names. I'll name one - The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Lee is reading from that old racist playback. He is a racist himself.
No, no, no! Blacks can't be racist. Didn't you get the memo, Roger?
[Update in the afternoon]
Obama says that no one has spoken out against anti-semitism more than he has. Jake Tapper isn't impressed:
Really? No one?
Elie Wiesel? Simon Wiesenthal? Alan Dershowitz?No one?
Wow.
Neither am I. Though, as some point out in comments there, you have to be impressed with his arrogance and self righteousness.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:16 AMHere's a fund raiser to help out the victims of the Canadian Human Wrongs Commission, and fight its (truly) fascist attempt to suppress speech in Canada.
[Late evening update]
A victory, sort of, for Canadian free speech. The Human Wrongs Commission has dismissed the case against McLeans and Mark Steyn. Not because it was ridiculous (which it was), but because that pesky law prevented them from properly censoring them:
The Ontario complaint was rejected because the relevant portions of Ontario Human Rights Code only address discrimination via signs or symbols, not printed material.
But while rejecting the complaint, the Commission strongly criticised Maclean's in a statement."While freedom of expression must be recognized as a cornerstone of a functioning democracy, the Commission strongly condemns the Islamophobic portrayal of Muslims, Arabs, South Asians and indeed any racialized community in the media, such as the Maclean's article and others like them, as being inconsistent with the values enshrined in our human rights codes," it said.
Note that this is really part of a civil war between moderate Muslims and radical ones in Canada:
Tarek Fatah, founder of the Muslim Canadian Congress, however, said that for the Commission "to refer to Maclean's magazine and journalists as contributing to racism is bullshit, if you can use that word."
He said the Commission has unfairly taken sides against freedom of speech in a dispute within the Canadian Muslim community between moderates and fundamentalists."There are within the staff [of the Ontario Human Rights Commission], and among the commissioners, hardline Islamic supporters of Islamic extremism, and this [handling of the Maclean's case] reflects their presence over there," Mr. Fatah said, identifying two people by name.
"In the eyes of the Ontario human rights commission, the only good Muslim is an Islamist Muslim," he said. "As long as we hate Canada, we will be cared for. As soon as we say Canada is our home and we have to defend her traditions, freedoms and secular democracy, we will be considered as the outside."
Canadians need to think long and hard about what kind of behavior they want to reward. There is no place for these kangaroo-court, "Human Rights Commissions," where one is guilty until proven innocent, in a truly free society.
[Thursday morning update]
More thoughts from the human rights violator himself:
So, having concluded they couldn't withstand the heat of a trial, the OHRC cut to the chase and gave us a drive-thru conviction. Who says Canada's "human rights" racket is incapable of reform? As kangaroo courts go, the Ontario branch is showing a bit more bounce than the Ottawa lads.
I'd be interested to know whether the Justice Minister of Ontario thinks this is appropriate behaviour. At one level, Chief Commissioner Barbara Hall appears to have deprived Maclean's and me of the constitutional right to the presumption of innocence and the right to face our accusers. But, at another, it seems clear the OHRC enforcers didn't fancy their chances in open court. So, after a botched operation, they've performed a cosmetic labiaplasty and hustled us out.
Instapundit has more, including this:
...for an organization that is supposed to promote "human rights," the HRC's agents seem curiously oblivious to basic aspects of constitutional law. In one famous exchange during the Lemire case, Steacy was asked "What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate?" -- to which he replied "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value." (I guess Section 2 has been excised from his copy of the Canadian Charter of Rights.)
[Late morning update]
Here's more on that Canadian blogger lawsuit. It sounds to me like someone, or several someones, need to sue Richard Warman (what an appropriate name) for false accusations and defamation of character.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:02 PMI've been very disappointed in my alma mater, in its continuing racist efforts to give preferences to students not on the content of their character or quality of their academics, but purely on the color of their skin, not to mention its defiance of the law and Supreme Court rulings against this egregious behavior. It now turns out that, in an ongoing effort to continue to illegally discriminate, it has been withholding data and lying to the courts:
Before the UM clamped down on CIR's request for data, Sander was able to confirm his earlier finding that the undergraduate system may have produced fewer harms than the law school system. For one thing, the newly-produced data showed that a substantial number of minorities with strong credentials attend the UM undergraduate college. These students could have been admitted without any consideration of race and presumably resisted offers from more competitive schools to attend the UM. It was thus possible for Sander to compare, for the first time, the academic records of UM undergraduate minorities who did not receive a racial preference with those who undoubtedly did.
According to Sander, there were dramatic differences between the two groups. Undergraduate blacks at the UM who were admitted without a preference had a graduation rate of 93% -- higher than the rate for comparable white students, and far higher than the graduation rate of the school as a whole. In stark contrast, UM undergraduate blacks who received a preference had a graduation rate of 47%. If Sander is right, it raises a real question whether this latter group benefited from the UM's heavy use of race or whether they would not have had better academic outcomes at less prestigious schools.While Judge Lawson now has dismissed the case, the reason probably has less to do with the law and more to do with the what the evidence was starting to show about the real harms of the preferential admissions policies followed for years by the UM and other schools. For the time being, Judge Lawson has sidelined the effort to get a full decade's worth of data as part of this litigation. But given what even three years worth of data seems to show, schools like Michigan will find it increasingly difficult to keep this data secret. If even the "holistic" use of race makes it difficult for minority students to compete academically, the moral and legal imperative to publicize and analyze this information becomes great.
This has done a real, damaging disservice to the minorities in whose supposed interest these misguided programs were designed. Instead of going to a school better suited to their abilities and succeeding, many of them flunk out in the face of the stiff competition in Ann Arbor or, if they make it through, fail the bar, when they may have been successful lawyers going to a second-tier law school. Of course, I suspect that the response of the geniuses who came up with this scheme would be to insist that they be given additional bar scores for their skin color to level the field...
In any event...
All of this is a far cry from last January when Mary Sue Coleman, Governor Granholm and the rest of the political establishment said they would keep Prop. 2 tied up in legal knots for years. While BAMN's decision to sue seemed like a good idea last year, it's a good idea that turned into their worst nightmare. Too bad for them.
Don't look for any boo hoos from me. This seems like poetic justice.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:53 AMI mentioned yesterday that, in addition to hawking rockets, John Carmack had an assessment of the state of the industry and his competition. If you didn't read it, it's well worth a read, and I largely agree with it. Just a few quibbles:
Scaled / Virgin is the safest bet for success. Outside of the X-15, Space Ship One is the only example of a reusable, 100km class manned vehicle. Everyone else, us included, requires a lot more extrapolation for an investor to believe in, and the problem isn't nearly as trivial as some people like to make it out to be with the "There are no technical challenges, just give us the money!" lines. It is not true that any old team could have won the X-Prize if Paul Allen had given them $20 million.
On this last sentence, while I don't have any reason to think that John is aiming that comment at me in particular, I have made statements, both at Space Access a couple weeks ago and here, that some might mistakenly take to mean that I would dispute this. I have said that Burt's success lay not (just) in his engineering talents, but more importantly, in his reputation and ability to raise the money. When I said that the mystique of Burt has been broken, my point was that many people believed (and still may believe) that only Burt could have won the X-Prize, in terms of technical capability, and I don't believe that to be the case.
Clearly, only Burt was capable of raising the money (at least from Paul Allen) to win the X-Prize, and that this was the critical achievement. I do believe that there are others who, had they been adequately funded (i.e., on the same level as Burt) could have won as well. That does not mean that I believe that "any old team" could have done it--there were obviously many teams that couldn't engineer their way out of a wet kleenex. It takes a combination of engineering capability and funding. There was more engineering capability than funding available, at least at the time, and only Burt had both, so Burt won.
I also agree with John's assessment that Scaled's approach is low risk, but also high marginal cost and not particularly operable (and not as safe as advertised from the standpoint of propulsion--I've long been on record as saying that hybrids have been overhyped from a safety standpoint, and have suggested to Alex Tai that he should be soft peddling this aspect). They've chosen a hyperconservative design that will be safe, but they also risk getting undercut in price by more operable systems with lower marginal costs, and marginal costs are important when you get into a price war. Sir Richard has the funds to subsidize the system for a while to compete, but I doubt if he wants to do it forever. So they are smart to be a space line that will have access to other vehicles, because I suspect that they're going to decide that they need options other than WK2/SS2.
I also agree that Dreamchaser is not a promising concept (again, partly because hybrids have been overhyped). I thoroughly agree with his pithy assessment of EADS/Astrium's laughable proposal: "Oh, please."
I think that his assessment of his own efforts is valid. He has taken an approach of build a little, test a little, and expanded it to build a lot, fly a lot, and he does in fact probably have more test time than all the other folks put together (though as he notes, XCOR is likely to catch up quickly as they move forward with X-Racer and Lynx).
The great thing is that we don't have to bet on a single horse. There are a number of competing approaches, both in terms of how to develop vehicles, and what kind of experience to offer to the customers. You'll never get me in the fishbowl, both because I'd feel much too exposed, but also because I don't think that I'll ever trust engines alone to get me down safely. That doesn't mean that it won't be a successful concept in the market, though. Unlike many, I don't foolishly extrapolate my own interests to the rest of the marketplace. I think that there will be different strokes for different folks, and that only by trying a number of different approaches will we see how many of them will be successful, and which will be most successful, which is something that will never happen under a government space program (though we had at least a shot at it under Steidle's plan for a CEV fly-off, until Mike came along and canned him, and implemented the One True Concept).
We've been talking for a long time about a return to the early days of aviation, with a wide variety of approaches, and letting the market sort it out. It appears that we're finally on the verge of seeing that happen, and I find it very exciting, for all that it's belated.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:03 AMClark Lindsey has helpfully pulled together and organized a bunch of links on one page covering Space Access '08.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:00 AMMichelle Obama's handlers wanted to make sure they had enough white people:
While the crowd was indeed diverse, some students at the event questioned the practices of Mrs. Obama's event coordinators, who handpicked the crowd sitting behind Mrs. Obama. The Tartan's correspondents observed one event coordinator say to another, "Get me more white people, we need more white people." To an Asian girl sitting in the back row, one coordinator said, "We're moving you, sorry. It's going to look so pretty, though."
"I didn't know they would say, 'We need a white person here,'" said attendee and senior psychology major Shayna Watson, who sat in the crowd behind Mrs. Obama. "I understood they would want a show of diversity, but to pick up people and to reseat them, I didn't know it would be so outright."
Hey, it must be that new politics we've been hearing so much about. Actually, the only thing shocking to me is that it was reported.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:06 PMRobert Bidinotto wants me to boycott Starbucks. It's a worthy cause, I guess, but I've been boycotting Starbucks ever since they opened their first store. I've never purchased anything there for my own personal consumption, with the possible exception of a bottle of water once.
The simple reason is that they have never offered anything for sale in which I have an interest in consuming. It's nothing but various forms of coffee, which I don't drink, and high-glycemic carbs, which I tend to avoid, particularly since there is no protein on offer to go with them (in my limited experience--I suppose it's possible that that's changed). And I'm not that into the "coffee house" experience.
So I can't really help make a dent in reducing their sales, because it's not possible for me to purchase less from them than I already do. If everyone were like me, they wouldn't exist at all to denigrate the capitalism that has made them so successful. But maybe some of my pro-free-market readers can reduce their consumption.
It occurs to me, while I'm on the subject, to write about a topic on which I've often mused, but never posted--what the world would be like if everyone were like me. Well, obviously, it would be a lot more boring place. With no s3x, other than self congress, because there's no way that I would get it on with me.
Just off the top of my head, there would be no rap music. In fact, most popular music wouldn't be popular at all. No dance clubs. There would be college football, assuming that some of me were willing and able to play (not obvious, as my athletic ability is marginal), but probably not pro. There would be baseball (again, my skills permitting), but no hockey or basketball. Or boxing or wrestling, or martial arts. There would be Formula 1, but no NASCAR. Lots of hiking trails in the mountains. No one would live in south Florida.
No coffee houses, as noted above, or coffee production, period. Same thing with tea. No tree nuts would be grown or harvested, because I'm allergic. The Asian restaurants would be much better, as would Mexican ones (they'd all be Sonoran style). No wraps or vegetarian places.
It would also be a much messier place, because I'm kind of a slob.
On the up side, though, traffic would move much faster, and much more smoothly. And we'd all get on and off airplanes extremely expeditiously. And there would be no wars, both because (I know that this will surprise some of the trolls here) I'm not that into them, and I'm not sure what we'd fight about. Oh, and we'd have a sensible space program.
So, what would the world be like if it consisted of only you?
Posted by Rand Simberg at 10:06 AMA skyscraper over half a mile high. Man, what a target for terrorists. And conveniently located, too.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 09:55 AMA world without borders. You may say I'm a dreamer, but (unfortunately) I'm not the only one.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:11 AMAcademia has already been greatly damaged by post-modernists and an extreme leftist bias over the past few decades, but fortunately math and science have been spared, to date. Those days may be coming to an end, though, as Christina Hoff Sommers warns about the potential Title IXing of science, based (ironically) on shoddy science (similar to the "comparable worth" myth).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:03 AMA few weeks ago, I mentioned a new space blog, called Parabolic Arc, which had pretty good content. Unfortunately, the colors chosen for it (gray text on black background) made it almost literally unreadable. That problem has been fixed, so I'd urge folks to check it out again. (It's been in the blogroll for a while. I'm actually tempted to move it up higher in preference to some others that are being updated very infrequently).
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:19 AMJohn Carmack mentioned this at the conference a week and a half ago, but I don't think I reported it, at least not in any detail. Armadillo is willing to sell vehicles to anyone who wants to fly them (presumably subject to ITAR restrictions):
The way to look at it is as a "rocket trainer", rather than a vehicle that can perform any kind of real lunar or suborbital mission. We don't pretend that the vehicles could actually land on the moon, but if you want to hack on a real, flying system, there is a lot of value to be had.
The price is $500k. The experience of the Lunar Lander Challenge shows quite clearly that you aren't likely to do it yourself for less, even if you spend a couple years at it. Several intelligent and competent people thought otherwise, and have been proven incorrect.You can have either a module or a quad, at your choice. The quad has more hover duration, but it is more of a hassle to operate. A module could be fulfilled right now, a quad would take about three months to build, since we are still planning on using Pixel for LLC this year and other tasks. The engine will be one of our new film cooled stainless chambers, and we will warrant it for ten flights. If it blows up or burns through in that time frame, we will replace it. We will not replace the vehicle if it crashes, but historically our engine problems have been visible at startup, and you should have an opportunity to abort the flight. Ground support equipment is included, except for the lox dewar(s), which would be specific to your local lox vendor. We will test the vehicle ourselves, then train your crew to operate it. You get copies of our experimental permit applications and information about the insurance policies we use for permitted flights. Details on modifications to the flight control software are negotiable.
If he got a big order, or multiple customers who wanted delivery ASAP, I wonder how he'd respond? Would he ramp up production (with the intrinsic risks to quality), or keep supply constant and crank up the price? As I've said for a long time, at some point this is going to have to transition from a hobby to a business for him, and it seems to me that this has the potential to force that decision, if he has a significant number of takers.
I also wonder how much new engines will cost, assuming that they're only good for ten flights (he doesn't say that, but it's all he's willing to warrant them for). Let's say that the engines are half the cost of the vehicle. That would mean a cost of $25K a flight to amortize the engines, which is a lot more than propellant costs. It seems to me that if he only thinks that he can get ten flights, engine life is where his emphasis needs to be for reducing operating costs. It's also hard to see how he can charge the same amount for a module as a quad, since the latter has four engines in it. I'd really like to understand more about this proposition.
He follows up the offer with his assessment of the industry (and his competition), but I'll save my thoughts on that for another post.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 05:38 AMC'mon, people, I appreciate the concern, really, but get a grip (or is that grippe?). It's just the flu.
In most cases, you don't need to see your doctor when you have a cold or the flu. However, if you have any of the symptoms below, seek medical advice.
- A cold that lasts for more than 10 days
- Earache or drainage from your ear
- Severe pain in your face or forehead
- Temperature above 102° F
- Shortness of breath
- Hoarseness, sore throat or a cough that won't go away
Emphasis mine. The first five bullets never happened, the hoarseness lasted about three days last week, I never had much of a sore throat, and the cough is a lot better today (i.e., I didn't do it much). I've got most of my energy back, and I think I'm mostly over it.
I think that there is a lot of wasted money in the health care system of people seeing doctors when there's really not much that they can do. It also clogs up emergency rooms. It's particularly bad when they bully them into prescribing antibiotics, which have no effect on a virus, and then they take half the course and quit, thus breeding more resistant bugs. I'm not the type to avoid a doctor if I need to see a doctor, but really folks, it's just the flu.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:17 PMMichael Ramirez has won a Pulitzer.
I liked this recent one, myself.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:28 PMJeff Foust reports on the administrator's testimony before the Senate:
"Do not confuse my desire for international collaboration for a willingness to rely on others for strategic capability," he said in open remarks at a subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee last week. Dependence on Soyuz "is not an option we would choose, but it is where we are today. In fact, we must seek an exception to the Iran Syria North Korea Nonproliferation Act because we have no immediate replacement for the shuttle and no other recourse if we wish to sustain the ISS."
Given that statement, you would think that Griffin would be interested in accelerating domestic commercial options like COTS that would lessen or eliminate an reliance on the Russians. Yet, in his comments later in the hearing, he was not that interested in pursuing a crew option for COTS (also known as Capability D) on an accelerated schedule.
Yeah, you'd think. But I suspect that he fears that if COTS is seen to be making too-rapid progress, it will jeopardize funding for Ares/Orion, by making them seem superfluous. Of course, the traditional argument is that they are designed for the lunar mission, whereas a station crew transfer capability wouldn't have that additional capability. And Orion is supposedly not just for going back to the moon but for use in a Mars mission as well (though it is never explained what its role is in such a mission). I can't believe anyone seriously believes that a Mars mission would be performed in a glorified Apollo capsule--it's simply too small, and the crew would go nuts. If it's meant as the means to return them to earth upon return to earth orbit, well, OK, but it's pretty pathetic to think that, seventy years after the first lunar landing, we would still be returning people to the planet in a capsule on a chute (particularly if they end up with a water landing).
Of course, the real danger is that we'll get the worst of both worlds--a continuation of Ares/Orion, which are supposedly being built because they are necessary to go to the moon, but we drop the lunar mission from the policy, so they revert to simply replacing (or competing with) COTS crew capability. And unfortunately, as devoted Democrat Greg Zsidisin has discovered in a one on one, that seems to be exactly Obama's plan. The only saving grace of it is that, in delaying the development by five years, it really means that the program will die. But it betrays a fundamental lack of understanding of the nature of space policy, and space hardware and development, on the part of Obama and/or his advisors. You can't "delay" a program like this and have any hope that it won't end up costing much more over the long run, particularly because you'll lose many of the key personnel for it, who aren't going to sit around twiddling their thumbs at no pay for half a decade while Obama solves the education problem. It's really quite absurd. But then, most of his proposed policies are--one of the many reasons that he isn't going to be elected.
As an aside, Jim Muncy said during the wrap-up panel last week in Phoenix that NASA has a bigger problem with the Iran Non-Proliferation Act than buying Soyuzes to replace Shuttle. Because the facilities are in the Russian segment, the ISS astronauts won't even be able to use the potty if they don't get a waiver, which could get pretty interesting on a six-month tour. The notion brought up the obvious jokes: "You'll just have to hold it," and "You should have gone before you launched..."
[Tuesday morning update]
Jon Goff has further thoughts:
...if you were a congressman or senator with a limited amount of money available, and you have two risky ventures to pick from to try and reduce the gap, what would you do? Would you place all your money on the one option where your money is going to be a relative drop in the bucket, and that even then has little or no chance of actually reducing the gap? Or would you invest at least part of your money in a much smaller program where it has a much higher probability of actually hastening the day when the US once again has manned spaceflight capabilities--and better yet, commercial manned spaceflight capabilities?
You do the math.
Unfortunately, the only math that interests most congresspeople is the number of jobs in their district or state, with "the Gap" a distant second place. Mike knows that, which is why he can get away with this stuff, or at least why he has to date.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:12 PMI'm still not over this bug. I was pretty much done with the chills, sweats and fever a week ago, but it's transmogrified into something more like a head cold. My nose has pretty much dried up now, and my voice no longer resembles that of a frog, so I can do business on the phone again, but it's settled into my lungs now, and my energy level remains pretty low. Today is coughing-up-a-lung day (though sometimes it feels like I might reach down deep and hock up a kidney). I don't think it's turning into pneumonia, but I'll keep an eye on it. All I know is that I don't have much energy. The good news is that I'm catching up on my reading, including finally getting around to Jonah's book
Because my life was too care free, and being a glutton for punishment, I decided to upgrade from Fedora Core 7 to 8.
Unfortunately, the latest distribution doesn't fit on CDs any more, and I don't have a DVD reader in the machine to be upgraded. So I decided to build a boot disk on a cd, and do it from the network. So I build the CD, for x86_64 (the machine is running on an Athlon 64), boot with it, and everything is going fine until it's about ready to start checking for dependencies. It gives me a message (from memory): "You are about to upgrade to x86_64, but your previous installation is i386. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?"
I scratch my head. I'm pretty sure that the last install was a 64 bit one. Maybe they mean that it will fail if I don't have a 64-bit processor, but I do, so I tell it to go ahead. It starts checking dependencies, and the bar starts to move slowly to the right. Until it's a quarter of the way, at which point it quits moving. I go away and come back in an hour. Still no motion. I go away and come back after a couple hours. Still stuck. I go to bed. I get up in the morning. No more progress. It finally exits with an error.
I try it from a different FTP site. No joy.
OK, if it thinks that it's an i386 installation, I'll just update that, and worry about making it 64 bit later. Burn the disk. Boot.
This time, when I get to the same place, I get the following message: "You are about to upgrade to i386, but your previous installation is x86_64. It is likely that this upgrade will fail. Do you want to continue?"
Note the subtle difference from the previous error message.
OK, the installer is schizo. When I try to install i386, it thinks it's replacing x86_64, and when I try to install x86_64, it thinks it's replacing i386. I tell it to go ahead. I get the same result--it hangs during the dependency check, at exactly the same place.
Any Fedora gurus out there with any suggestions? (Pete Zaitcev, I'm looking at you...)
Posted by Rand Simberg at 02:32 PM...or is that just a snake in your pants?
The video is a little difficult to see, but shop owner Rick Preuss say it's clear she's reaching into the cage and stuffing the snake down her pants. He says the woman had been in the store for some time, staking out the cage."In some ways, I wish it were this really big snake going down her pants [so you could see it better]. Instead what you see is a quick view from the camera" of the snake pattern, he says.
Well, if he were still around, Freud would say that she has trouser-snake envy.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:00 PMMen no longer have go through the drudgery of determining whether or not chix are hawt. We can now have the computers do it for us:
"The computer produced impressive results -- its rankings were very similar to the rankings people gave." This is considered a remarkable achievement, believes Kagian, because it's as though the computer "learned" implicitly how to interpret beauty through processing previous data it had received.
I wonder what units it used to judge? Millihelens (that amount of female beauty required to launch a single ship)?
Of course, that was the easy part:
Kagian, who studied under the Adi Lautman multidisciplinary program for outstanding students at Tel Aviv University, says that a possible next step is to teach computers how to recognize "beauty" in men. This may be more difficult. Psychological research has shown that there is less agreement as to what defines "male beauty" among human subjects.
No kidding. I've sure never been able to figure it out. Maybe it can just check his bank balance.
Which brings up an interesting (and potentially politically incorrect) point. I think that women are clearly much better at determining whether other women are attractive to men than men are at figuring out whether or not other men are attractive to women (at least physically). I suspect that this is because physical attributes are (for evolutionary reasons, unfortunately) where women primarily compete, so they have to be more attuned to it. I also think that this is why women tend to be more receptive to same-sex relations than men, even nominally heterosexual women (hence the concept of the LUG--lesbian until graduation). In order to be a judge of feminine pulchritude, it helps a lot to appreciate it, and it's a shorter step from there to wanting to experience it up closer and personal than it is for a guy. Particularly a guy like me, who finds men disgusting, and is eternally grateful that not all women do.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:02 PMI'm sure as hell not an Abu Ghraib American. Obama seems to be, though.
[Update early Friday evening]
Here are more thoughts from Jennifer Rubin:
One might argue, as many of us here have, that his association with Wright was more than a failure to anticipate public reaction: it was a moral and intellectual failing. (Juan Williams, as he has before, explains this in today's Wall Street Journal with searing clarity.) Yet she has a point: does Obama lack a "feel" for ordinary voters' sensibilities?
Well, of course. His life experience is utterly unlike the average voter's. On his journey from Hawaii to Indonesia to Hawaii to Harvard, he probably ran into a lot of critiques of American culture and not very much bowling. He hasn't, it looks like, developed an internal compass that warns him when something may be offensive or off-putting to ordinary Americans.
Yup. Like some of my commenters, who will thus be quite shocked when he gets blown out this fall by those same "ordinary Americans." It's actually quite amusing how the supposed "party of the people" has become so elitist, and gotten so out of touch.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:10 AMIt's always been obvious to me that they do, at various levels. I've always found bizarre the notion of some scientists that only humans are capable of cognition. As this long but interesting article points out, it makes no sense in evolutionary terms. The cognitive traits that we have had to have their origins somewhere, though what's even more interesting is that it seems to be a parallel development (that is, like the eye, intelligence has evolved more than once). And it's not anthropomorphizing to recognize clear thoughtful and volitional behavior in cats and dogs. I don't understand the thinking of these modern-day Descartes (he didn't believe that animals were capable of feeling pain) who believe that animals are simply automatons. But then, some of these loons didn't believe that newborns were capable of feeling pain, either, and used to (and perhaps still do) perform major surgery sans anesthesia, ignoring the screaming.
[Via Geek Press]
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:35 AMCurse you to heck. I didn't even listen to the thing, but that stupid song is stuck in my head anyway, just from reading about it.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:17 AMJon Goff has a wrap up of the issues (mostly technical) that came up in the panel discussion last Friday in Phoenix.
As he notes, there was little discussion of what other markets we can find than DoD and NASA. The problem is that until the capability is demonstrated, it's going to be very hard to sell it to the conservative comsat industry. The nearest-term plausible private market that I can conceive of is Bigelow, if he still wants to do his lunar cruises. It would be interesting to put together a business model using Genesis modules swinging around the moon, and see if it's greater or less than projected NASA Constellation needs.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 06:01 AMUntil Yuri's Night. It will also be the twenty-seventh anniversary of the first Shuttle launch.
Looking at the map, the only Florida party I see is up in Cocoa Beach. Between Palm Beach, Fort Lauderdale and Miami, you'd think that south Florida would be able to come up with something.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 08:35 AMI've got an afternoon flight out of LAX that gets in late tonight. Things should start to get back to blogging normal tomorrow.
[Update about 3 PM PDT]
Well, tomorrow got here faster than I thought. No, I'm not blogging from the air. I (barely) missed my flight. I could have made it but it would have been sans luggage. I'm staying with my webmaster for the afternoon and evening, and going out on the redeye tonight. Fortunately, I wangled an upgrade.
[Wednesday afternoon update]
Got in about 7 AM EDT. Still catching up on sleep (and not just because of the red eye). Back a little later, perhaps with a (slight) site upgrade.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 11:02 AMIt's not the space programs that are a fantasy, Mark. The fantasy is the ludicrous wishful thinking on your part that either of them are racing.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:47 AMJon Goff has the Powerpoints of Friday night's propellant depot panel, including mine.
Posted by Rand Simberg at 07:44 AM